Robert B. Parker
Robert Brown Parker (1932-2010) was a New England soul with a Massachusetts heart and Boston blood. He had a mind patient enough to play the academic game (Colby College B.A., Boston University M.A. and Ph.D.). He taught at Northeaster University from 1971-1979, notching a full professorship in 1976. He was a Korean War veteran. His first novel was published in 1971. When he left academia for full-time writing in 1979 he had had five novels published about a private eye named Spenser.
By the time his life-long wife Joan (the model for Spenser’s love, Susan Silverman) found him dead at his writing table in 2010, he had written 39 Spenser novels, 9 novels featuring Jesse Stone (a L.A. cop who retires to a New England small town), 6 novels featuring Sunny Randall (a female private eye, ex-cop, Boston-based), and 4 Westerns about Virgil Cole and Everett Hitch. An assortment of other books, including an authorized sequel to Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep, rounded out his prolific career.
Parker rejuvenated the private eye literary field, one he loved and respected. He was a master of an ironic humor, economy of action, and an understated passionate drive in his protagonists. He had his literary jokes, but they were as often meant to puncture pretension as to wink at the reader.
After his death, Joan carried out Parker’s wishes (or his lack of territoriality) by arranging that his “properties” be continued by other writers who would respect the integrity of what he had created. I include those books here as well as Parker’s own addictive works.
Spare Change [Sunny Randall #6]
Spare Change [Sunny Randall #6]
Boston P.I. Sunny Randall joins forces with the most important man in her life—her father—to crack a thirty-year-old case.
When a serial murderer dubbed “The Spare Change Killer” by the Boston press surfaces after three decades in hiding, the police immediately seek out the cop, now retired, who headed the original task force: Phil Randall. As a sharp-eyed investigator and a doting parent (“You’re smart. You’re tough . . . You, too, are a paradigm of law enforcement- perfection, and you’re my kid”), Phil calls on his daughter Sunny to help trap the criminal who eluded him so many years before.
After interviewing just a handful of suspects, Sunny is certain that she’s found her man. Though she has no evidence against Bob Johnson, she trusts her intuition. And she knows the power she has over him—she can feel the skittishness and sexual tension that he radiates when he’s around her—but convincing her father and the rest of the task force is a different story.
When the killer strikes a second time and a third, the murders take a macabre turn, as, eerily, the victims each resemble Sunny. While her father pressures her to drop the case, her need to create a trap to catch her killer grows.
In a compelling game of cat-and-mouse, Sunny Randall uses all her skills to draw out her prey, realizing too late that she’s setting herself up to become the next victim.