Publishers Weekly
03/05/2018
The 1990 Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist, one of the art world’s greatest unsolved mysteries, provides the spark for bestseller Atkins’s entertaining seventh Spenser novel (after 2017’s Little White Lies). Locke, an old colleague, tells Spenser he’s dying and looking to settle his affairs. In particular, he wants the Boston PI’s help in recovering El Greco’s The Gentleman in Black, one of three valuable paintings stolen from the Winthrop Museum two decades earlier. Locke has pursued the thieves for years without success, but now the Winthrop’s director has started to receive letters from someone with convincing details about the theft. A solution to the case could at last be at hand. Spenser soon finds himself in a race against an obnoxious British investigator who specializes in art crimes. As usual, Atkins emulates Parker’s style and dry humor flawlessly (“It was Susan’s turn to cook, so we had reservations at Harvest”), but this straightforward, plot-driven entry lacks the attention to the developing relationship between Spenser and Susan that marked the previous book. Author tour. Agent: Esther Newberg, ICM. (May)
From the Publisher
Atkins perfectly catches Spenser’s breezy voice and Parker’s knack for creating vivid characters.”—Seattle Times
More Praise for Robert B. Parker's Old Black Magic
“Atkins . . . again captures all the qualities Spenser fans love in the series: smart-ass humor, a touch of romance, plenty of violence, and, of course, Spenser’s complex sense of honor. Atkins adds his own touch in the form of complex plots with genuine mysteries at their center.”—Booklist
Praise for Ace Atkins and the Spenser Series
“Handpicked by the Parker estate to be the keeper of the flame for the Spenser franchise, award-winning author Ace Atkins rises flawlessly to the occasion. In addition to the signature dialogue, all the familiars are fully resurrected: Susan, the sexy shrink; Pearl, the wonder dog; Hawk, the wonder sidekick; good cop Quirk, and, of course, Spenser himself, that consummate knight errant for the twenty-first century.”—Kirkus Reviews
“It’s a feat when a writer creates characters who live and breathe on the page and make readers care and keep coming back for more. To manage that with someone else’s characters, let alone with an icon like Spenser, is a minor miracle. Ace Atkins pulls it off.”—Chicago Sun-Times
“Atkins does a wonderful job with the characters created by Parker.”—Booklist
“Classic Spenser—the Spenser of wry wit, tasty food and drinks, hard workouts and lethal confrontations...Once again, Atkins has delivered a thriller that evokes the best of Parker’s Spenser series, not least the punchy back-and-forth of the dialogue.”—Associated Press
“Atkins has done a splendid job of capturing the voice of the late Robert B. Parker.”—Publishers Weekly
Library Journal
12/01/2017
Twenty years after a stash of paintings was lifted from a Boston museum, paint chips from the most valuable piece land on a journalist's desk, and Boston PI Spenser is tapped to track down the missing lot. Not surprisingly, he encounters black market art dealers, but Mafia bigwigs and a long-ago murder?
Kirkus Reviews
2018-02-20
Twenty years after a storied theft from a Boston institution—no, not the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum—the powers that be want Spenser, another Boston institution, to recover three stolen artworks that are still missing.Spenser, who wouldn't be interested in the Winthrop Museum's problems if Locke, a dying colleague who's been keeping an eye on it for two decades, hadn't entreated him, agrees to grab the reins even though he's not crazy about temperamental Winthrop director Marjorie Ward Phillips, and museum board chairman Topper Townsend's not crazy about him. The real prize among the three is El Greco's The Gentleman in Black, valued at $60 million to $70 million. But it's the promise that by paying $500,000 she can buy back one of the others, an early Picasso drawing, that hooks Large Marj into agreeing to a trade-off that goes predictably awry, leaving Spenser with undeserved egg on his face. Replaced by Townsend's choice, Paul Marston, a British private investigator as objectionable as he is incompetent, Spenser, now free to pursue the standing $5 million reward the museum's offered, works his contacts twice as hard. Certain that the crooks must have been amateurs who had inside help, he soon starts to see connections between the perps and the Boston mob. The trouble is that it's been so long since the job was pulled that the cops who originally worked the case for the Boston PD and the FBI are mostly retired. Even worse, the mob has gone through even more personnel changes, and the guys most likely to know anything about the heist have long been unavailable for questioning.The case gets successively murkier, but Atkins, in his best imitation of Parker's voice to date, never gets lazy. Readers who approach the last chapter anticipating relief at finally seeing the case solved should be warned that a final twist virtually guarantees a sequel.
