The Professional (Spenser Series #37)

by Robert B. Parker

Overview

The wives of Boston's wealthiest men have a mutual secret: they all had an affair with the same cad who's blackmailing them, and Spenser's been hired to stop him. But when the wives start dying one by one, Spenser's new case becomes murder.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781101148587
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	10/05/2009
Series:	Spenser Series , #37
Sold by:	Penguin Group
Format:	eBook
Pages:	352
Sales rank:	49,936
File size:	589 KB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Robert B. Parker was the author of seventy books, including the legendary Spenser detective series, the novels featuring police chief Jesse Stone, and the acclaimed Virgil Cole–Everett Hitch westerns, as well as the Sunny Randall novels. Winner of the Mystery Writers of America Grand Master Award and long considered the undisputed dean of American crime fiction, he died in January 2010.

Date of Birth:

September 17, 1932

Date of Death:

January 18, 2010

Place of Birth:

Springfield, Massachusetts

Place of Death:

Cambridge, Massachusetts

Education:

B.A. in English, Colby College, 1954; M.A., Ph. D. in English, Boston University, 1957, 1971

Website:

http://robertbparker.net/

Editorial Reviews

This case begins, as they often do, with a relatively simple assignment. Apparently, a lothario named Gary Eisenhower has been romancing and then blackmailing the wives of several very wealthy Bostonians. Spenser's job, if he chooses to accept it, is to persuade this lowlife conniver to cease and desist. When blackmail turns to murder, however, everything suddenly becomes more complicated and much more dangerous. Robert B. Parker's 38th Spenser novel shows that the master is still at the top of his game.

Bestseller Parker makes producing snappy banter look easy in his 37th Spenser novel (after Rough Weather). He also manages to draw new readers into the Boston PI's major personal relationships—with love interest Susan Silverman and friend/ally/bodyguard Hawk—without shoveling on the backstory. Spenser agrees to help a quartet of married women fend off extortion demands from stud Gary Eisenhower, with whom each has had an affair. Meanwhile, the husband of one of the women under blackmail threat hires some thugs to deal with the matter. The action takes its time getting to a dead body, but, as usual, the smooth, entertaining prose more than compensates for any deficiencies of plot. The absence of major personal developments for Spenser or his associates marks this as a less memorable entry than others in this iconic series, but it remains a solid, enjoyable contemporary detective novel. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

Not even Spenser's formidable gifts are equal to the problems posed by a charming blackmailer who kisses and threatens to tell. At least four women-Abigail Larson, Beth Jackson, Regina Hartley and Nancy Sinclair-have been photographed and tape-recorded trysting with Gary Eisenhower. Their only regret is that if he doesn't get $25,000 a month from each of them, he'll go to their older, wealthier husbands. While they're fretting about their limited options and Spenser is tracking the lover they shared to Pinnacle Fitness, one of the husbands, tough-guy financier Chester Jackson, gets wind of Spenser's inquiries and takes matters into his own hands, sending a pair of goons after Boston's favorite detective. Spenser can deal with the goons, at least at first, but he can't deal with Eisenhower, who blandly admits that he likes sleeping with married women, lots of them, and likes raising money from his amours even better. At length Spenser succeeds in orchestrating the kind of pressure necessary to make Eisenhower back down. But by then the case has already started to spiral, like so many of the PI's recent outings (Rough Weather, 2008, etc.), into something darker and more violent, something Spenser doesn't know any better how to deal with. Even after three characters have died and he's certain who killed them, he still can't figure out how "to make everything come out okay."Though Parker's flagship sleuth doesn't distinguish himself as either a detective or a problem-solver, his bewildered uncertainty is more touching and revealing than his customary machismo.

Kirkus Reviews

Actor Joe Mantegna delivers a one-man performance. Parker's hard-boiled Boston detective, Spenser, does his usual thing in solving a few murders while philosophizing, clobbering bad guys, and cavorting with his psychoanalyst squeeze, Susan, and scary (but here mostly absent) friend, Hawk. Opening and closing musical snippets comprise the audio enhancements; mostly Mantegna is on his own. He’s a strong narrator; the text flows smoothly, and the characters are precisely distinguished. The only distraction is Parker’s overuse of dialogue tags (more noticeable on audio than in print). The Boston milieu does not demand Brahmin accents but plain middle America. That's a plus. D.R.W. © AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine

FEBRUARY 2010 - AudioFile