The Professional

RIP Robert B Parker..Enjoy The Big Sleep Criminal Minds star Joe Mantegna has been doing the Spenser Audio book series for a number of years. He hits his stride early in his narration of The Professional. Mantegna knows to let text speak for itself. He does great vocal shading of the characters. Still, it is the way Parker can turn a phrase into something to listen to. His Spenser novels (and audio books) are usually in the first person, and Mantegna makes the situation shine on audio Spenser is never better than in this book. This modern day Sam Spade has a blackmail case with four rich women and a gigolo. It gets complicated, as most Spenser novels do. This is not a locked room Agatha Christie novel. It is a modern day pulp novel. Just know this, but any Spenser audio/novel is a throwback to classic A Hammett private eye tales with some modern day twists. The end of the book you can see it coming for a half hours before it epilogs on the CD. However this one is worth its weight in audio gold. When I wrote this column, Author Robert B Parker Passed away at 77. I will miss all Spenser, Jess Stone and Sunny Randall novels that the world will never see. Ace Atkins, author of "Devil's Garden," Wicked City" and several other novels. "When Parker brought out Spenser, it reinvigorated the genre. For me and countless others, we owe for him and reinventing Chandler's work and bringing it to the modern age. I wouldn't have a job now without Robert Parker." Bennet Pomerantz AUDIOWORLD

This novel is a great addition to the Spenser series, the latest available. Very, very good; Parker is back in form. All the great characters and dialogue and a great plot and ending.

This was a great book and fast moving, like all of Parker's books. Love the dialog!!

The Professional is a good story, interesting and humorous. Yet, it has one disturbing matter. The book seems to be broken down into two parts. The first part is about the blackmailing, the second about murders. The first part is somewhat disturbing. The basic theme of the first part is in Sir Author Conan Doyle's The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverston. Sherlock Holmes seems unable to save a woman from being blackmailed because she does not want to file suit against the blackmailer in court. Holmes perseveres, but Spenser, faced with the same problem, does not. Isn't blackmailing a married woman for having sex with a man who is not her husband despicable? And isn't it even more despicable if the man who is doing the blackmailing is the man who seduced her so that he could blackmail her? Spenser is the modern "knight in shining armor" who saves damsels in distress, but who seems to like men who are daring Wild West types. But readers need to decide if Parker has gone too far in having Spenser like the blackmailer and not acting aggressively to help the women he is blackmailing. Shouldn't it fit the Spenser character better if he made more of an effort to save the four women who ask his help to rid them of the blackmailer? Or, are we to see that Spenser intuited that there was something about the women that made it wrong for him to help them? There is a theme that runs through many of Parker's novels: a good man - including Spenser - loses his beloved to another man. The cuckolded man forgives the woman who strayed and takes her back, usually because he is so much in love with her. Yet, he retains a feeling of disquiet. Readers of The Professional may want to ask themselves how this theme helps explain Spenser's behavior to the blackmailer and the women.

The 37th installment of Robert B. Parker's series featuring the detective with no first name opens with Spenser in familiar surroundings. He's alone in his Boston office when a woman shows up in need of his services. This may seem familiar to fans of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, who introduced us to their famous fictional detectives, Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe, respectively, in a similar manner. But while the opening seems the same, Parker has taken the PI novel much further than his renowned predecessors ever did as he reinvigorates the somewhat stilted genre. Longtime fans will find much to enjoy in THE PROFESSIONAL. The case appears straightforward: the woman who arrives in his office is a lawyer representing four rich married women who are all having affairs with the same man, Gary Eisenhower. Their husbands are older men in prominent positions. Eisenhower blackmails them with audio and video evidence of their trysts. Spenser starts investigating the case right away. He states, "But there was something wrong with the whole setup. Everything kept turning out not quite what it started out seeming to be." Something is awry, a staple of detective fiction, but Parker brings everything to a new level with his latest Spenser story, One of the things that throws a curveball into the case is that not only is Eisenhower not afraid of the cops, but none of the alleged victims of the crime are willing to press charges. And at least one woman sees no reason not to keep sleeping with Eisenhower! Since Spenser does not take money to rough up people or bump them off, the case is apparently at a dead end. He wishes the women good luck and leaves. But as fans know, Spenser just cannot let go as he tells the reader, "Nobody was paying me to do anything. On the other hand, nobody was paying me to do nothing, either. Business was slow. I was nosy. And I had kind of a bad feeling about this long running mess that I'd wandered into and hadn't done a lot to improve." And soon, dead bodies start popping up in true hard-boiled fashion, and Spenser's choice to stay involved is cemented. Due to Parker's adept writing, the reader can't turn away, either. Parker is called the dean of crime fiction, a title he richly deserves. He is a true master. Each Spenser book offers a clinic on how to write a fast-moving, entertaining novel. The chapters are short, the scenes are cinematic, the dialogue is crisp, and the writing is something both Hammett and Chandler would have tipped their hats to. Consider this: "I sat at the bar and ordered a beer. The bartender was a red-haired woman with an angular face and skin you could strike a match on." It does not get much better than that. Parker possesses the great writer's knack that he actually makes writing look simple when it's really not. This series has taken the detective novel into a new millennium. His plots could have been ripped from the headlines: powerful people caught in webs of sexual intrigue. But his rea