Double Deuce (Spenser Series #19)

by Robert B. Parker

Overview

Spenser is forced by loyalty into an alien world where violence is a way of lie and outsiders enter at a lethal risk. When Spenser's cohort, Hawk, is hired by the tenants of a gang-plagued Boston housing project known as "Double Deuce", he enlists his friend's aid.

A friend's girl and her infant daughter have been gunned down. Though the act at first appears to be an accidental drive-by shooting, it soon becomes clear that it was premeditated murder. Before they can solve the crime, Spenser and Hawk must take on an adolescent band of hardened urban warriors. As bullets fly and the brutality escalates, Spenser learns more than he ever dreamed about a generation imprisoned in a hell of poverty and hopelessness where muscle is the ticket to survival, and the surest way out is in a body bag.

Pulsing with moral complexity, Double Deuce is the kind of no-holds-barred action thriller only Robert B. Parker can create.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781101546505
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	04/01/1993
Series:	Spenser Series , #19
Sold by:	Penguin Group
Format:	eBook
Pages:	272
Sales rank:	29,362
File size:	325 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

Spenser and Hawk take on a black street-gang while, on the domestic front, Susan persuades Spenser to move in: more hard- boiled mystery with a runny yolk from the ever-entertaining Parker. After some good-natured haggling, Spenser's dark-side alter- ego Hawk agrees to pay the Boston shamus a third of what he's getting—"nothing"—to free a decayed ghetto housing project from the "Hobarts," the violent drug-dealing youth gang that controls it utterly; and, at the same time, to bring to justice whoever—most likely a Hobart—gunned down a 15-year-old and her infant daughter at the project. With Hawk as guide, then, Spenser enters the forbidding world of gangs, marveling at their colorful slang and ritualized ways, meditating—with input from a saintly youth worker—on their hopeless lives...which gets him to thinking a lot about Hawk and the cruel sacrifices the black bermensch made to escape the ghetto. Spenser's longtime girlfriend Susan thinks about that, too, while monitoring how her experiment in domesticating the p.i. is faring—not too well, actually, despite all the usual lovingly described scenes of cooking and soulful cooing between the two: Spenser is pacing like a caged tiger. Meanwhile, the gang's leader has fixed on Hawk as a kind of father figure, but one he'll have to slay ("Hawk, you and me the same," he says. "It got to be done we step up. Ain't afraid to be killing, ain't afraid to be dying") unless Hawk kills him first. The inevitable showdown is pure adrenaline—and the subsequent avenging of the murders, plus Spenser's dignified coming to terms with Susan, pure satisfaction. Nothing new, just Parker marking perfect time:Spenser fans will love it.

Kirkus Reviews