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Summary
Summary
A knock on Spenser's office door can only mean one thing: a new case. This time the visitor is a local lawyer with an interesting story. Elizabeth Shaw specializes in wills and trusts at the Boston law firm of Shaw & Cartwright, and over the years she's developed a friendship with wives of very wealthy men. However, these rich wives have a mutual secret: they've all had an affair with a man named Gary Eisenhower- and now he's blackmailing them for money. Shaw hires Spenser to make Eisenhower "cease and desist," so to speak, but when women start turning up dead, Spenser's assignment goes from blackmail to murder.
As matters become more complicated, Spenser's longtime love, Susan, begins offering some input by analyzing Eisenhower's behavior patterns in hopes of opening up a new avenue of investigation. It seems that not all of Gary's women are rich. So if he's not using them for blackmail, then what is his purpose? Spenser switches tactics to focus on the husbands, only to find that innocence and guilt may be two sides of the same coin.
With its eloquently spare prose and some of the best supporting characters to grace the printed page, The Professional is further proof that "[t]here's hardly an author in the crime novel business like Parker" ( Pittsburgh Post-Gazette ).
Author Notes
Robert Brown Parker was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, on September 17, 1932. He received a B.A. from Colby College in 1954, served in the U.S. Army in Korea, and then returned to receive a M. A. in English literature from Boston University in 1957. He received a Ph.D. in English literature from Boston University in 1971.
Before becoming a full-time writer in 1979, he taught at Lowell State College, Bridgewater State College and Northwestern University.
In 1971, Parker published The Godwuff Manuscript, as homage to Raymond Chandler. The character he created, Spencer, became his own detective and was featured in more than 30 novels. His Spencer character has been featured in six TV movies and the television series Spencer: For Hire that starred Robert Urich and ran from 1985 to 1988.
He is also the author of the Jesse Stone series, which has been made into a series of television movies for CBS, and the Sunny Randall series. His novel Appaloosa (2005) was made into a 2008 movie directed by and starring Ed Harris. He has received numerous awards for his work including an Edgar Award for Best Novel in 1977 for The Promised Land, Grand Master Edgar Award for his collective oeuvre in 2002, and the Gumshoe Lifetime Achievement Award in 2008. He died of a heart attack on January 18, 2010 at the age of 77.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
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.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Is there a more promising opening in contemporary crime fiction than Boston PI Spenser opening his office door to a new client? Instantly, we get Spenser's clear-eyed view of the client, what his or her dress and stature have to say, and the rat-a-tat-tat of Spenser's wise-guy answers to the client's queries. And then we're plunged into the client's problems, which quickly intensify, growing more and more dangerous both for client and Spenser. In this thirty-seventh of a series of unflagging excellence, Spenser's new client is a lawyer who seeks his advice on behalf of four of her women friends. They're all married to wealthy older men. They've all been carrying on simultaneous affairs with one very seductive man. The turnoff? The lothario has started blackmailing them. Spenser is hired to coerce the lover, Gary Eisenhower, to stop. Eisenhower, however, is immune to physical threats, and none of the women is willing to confess to her husband, thus ending the blackmail. Adding to the confusion, Eisenhower has cast a much wider net of exploited women than the four complainants. A series of murders ensues. Is it the handiwork of Eisenhower or of an unhinged husband? Dr. Susan Silverman, Spenser's longtime love, provides some intriguing psychological insights. Great plotting, clever dialogue, and Spenser's mouthwatering cooking all make for a fantastic time.--Fletcher, Connie Copyright 2009 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
Say something nasty about a child - even if it's true, and even if it's your own child - and there's hell to pay. Geraldine Bretherick, a stay-at-home mom, does that very thing in Sophie Hannah's new psychological-suspense thriller, THE WRONG MOTHER (Penguin, paper, $15), and sure enough, she's dead before the story starts. Hannah also wrote persuasively about modern women who buckle under the stress of motherhood in "Little Face," but characters in that novel felt compassion for the young mother who insisted that someone had switched newborns on her. Here, everyone hates Geraldine and recoils from the sentiments that come to light in her journal. "There's a 'conspiracy of silence' about what motherhood is really like," she wrote, between her fierce and funny rants against manipulative children who torment their exhausted mothers. No wonder the police are easily persuaded that Geraldine killed herself after drowning her daughter. Sally Thorning, the personable young wife and mother who relates portions of the narrative, isn't so sure. The previous year, in a desperate attempt to call a timeout from her own demanding domestic life, she had a brief affair with Geraldine's husband. But with the murder-suicide all over television, Sally realizes that the man who called himself Mark Bretherick was someone else. Before she can convince the obtuse cops that a more subtle cruelty is at work, another mother and child are found dead, and Sally knows her own life is in danger. Hannah goes in for all those bizarre plot twists and outlandish behaviors that have come to define the psychological-suspense story, but she does it with style and wit. And while these Gothic chords bring a dissonant note to the realistic chapters written in the police-procedural format, they can't muffle the voices of the women in this story who persist in speaking intimately and honestly about the pressures on them as supermoms. Maybe Geraldine never actually answered her daughter's question about whether Jesus went to "the heaven hotel" when he died with the flip response that, from what little she knew of him, "Jesus might prefer to go camping in the Lake District." But even saintly Sally, who works in environmental engineering, confides that chasing after two obstreperous children and catering to a distracted husband can make her feel as if her brain "has silted up and needs dredging," like the lagoons of Venice. What's it worth to save a marriage? Animal sacrifice is presented as an option in NEW WORLD MONKEYS (Shay Areheart, $23), an imaginative first novel by Nancy Mauro that's more entertaining than couples therapy. Lily and Duncan, a self-absorbed young couple from Manhattan, are driving up to their country place in Dutchess County when they hit a wild boar (the town mascot, but how were they to know?), which Lily finishes off with a tire iron. Shortly after, while digging a garden, Duncan unearths a human bone and a grave marker identifying the person as "Tinker, 1902." The exhumation that Lily and Duncan secretly carry out each weekend somehow becomes emblematic of their efforts to get beneath the civilized surface of their joyless marriage and unleash the primal beast within. Following the developments of this surreal plot is fun for a while, but the animal imagery becomes stifling, as does the brainy couple's incessant analysis of their every thought, word and gesture. "Maybe I've started swinging from the trees," Duncan says after giving Lily a slap on the behind. And maybe not. Just when you think you've got his number, Robert B. Parker pulls another bluff. THE PROFESSIONAL (Putnam, $26.95) opens with a standard challenge for Spenser, the knight-errant in this enduring private-eye series: rescue the ladies from the dragon and be quick about it. Four Boston women are being blackmailed by the worst kind of cad - the kind who keeps incriminating evidence that he threatens to show their rich husbands - and Spenser, who loves women and despises cads, is happy to take their case. But Gary Eisenhower, the cad in question, turns out to be such an amiable guy that, after mediating that unpleasant blackmail matter, Spenser makes it his business to protect Gary from the mobster husband of one of his victims. For some reason, the manliest of detectives becomes fascinated by the psychology of the ladies' man, and instead of bruising his knuckles on this case, he spends most of his time wittily discussing it with Susan Silverman, the psychotherapist who is his designated "honey bun." Maybe she knows what's up with the big guy. Ever since he started writing with his son Felix, Dick Francis seems to have found fresh inspiration at the racetrack. Ned Talbot, the protagonist of EVEN MONEY (Putnam, $26.95), is not a jockey or a trainer or any other typical Francis hero. He's a bookie - one of the "pariahs of the racing world." But because he sports the Francis colors of honesty, bravery and fair play, Ned is up to the job of finding the gremlin who upsets the Royal Ascot races by tampering with the electronic equipment that determines betting odds. It takes more guts for Ned to solve the murder of a stranger who has just introduced himself as his father. The neatest feat he pulls off, however, is giving readers a new perspective on the races that are a staple of this series. The track atmosphere is quite different down here among the independent turf accountants who are fighting off the big betting shops that are wringing much of the eccentric charm from a day at the races. Sophie Hannah's thriller deals with modern women who buckle under the stress of motherhood.
Kirkus Review
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 womenAbigail Larson, Beth Jackson, Regina Hartley and Nancy Sinclairhave 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. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
The latest (after Rough Weather) in the long-running Spenser series finds the wisecracking Boston PI employed by a bevy of beautiful women to investigate a handsome gigolo with a habit of seducing and blackmailing young wives of wealthy older men. Fists and literary allusions fly, accompanied by psychological commentary courtesy of Spenser's longtime girlfriend, Susan Silverman. Many series regulars make cameos as Spenser unravels the gigolo's blackmail scheme only to uncover other tangled webs of influence and victimization. The dialog crackles, and the plot moves quickly as Spenser discovers once again how sex, greed, and stupidity can disrupt the best laid plans, and how a personal moral code can be quite separate from social conventions or legal authority. Verdict A fast-paced, enjoyable trip through familiar territory for fans of the series. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 6/1/09.]-Bradley A. Scott, Brighton Dist. Lib., MI (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
