Potshot (Spenser Novels (Audio))

Rating:
Summary: Spenser's Wild West adventure
Review: "Potshot", Robert Parker's latest Spenser novel, gets back on familiar ground, if not a familiar location. After the tersely unmysterious "Hugger Mugger", Parker has Spenser cracking wise and being tough in Potshot, Arizona, where he's investigating the death of a high school football coach turned outfitter at the request of the deceased's pretty blond wife. All fingers are pointing towards the Preacher, who heads a gang of thugs who have been terrorizing Potshot (and driving down property values in the bargain), but Spenser has his doubts. Hired by Potshot's city council to clear out the thugs, Spenser heads back to Boston to recruit the ever-ready Hawk, then travels around to complete his posse with bad guys from previous books (including gay club-owner/tough guy Tedy Sapp from "Hugger Mugger", who's a dead ringer for Spike in Parker's Sunny Randall novels). Twists and turns abound, but Spenser, in his usual Renaissance Thug style, comes out the winner as always.

"Potshot" is a much better book than "Hugger Mugger," mainly because it has Spenser doing what he does best--busting heads, enjoying good food, and romancing Susan Silverman. He hasn't slowed down a whit, considering that if Parker's timeline is correct, Spenser is approaching seventy (Parker briefly mentions Spenser's time in Korea--do the math). Parker's prose is at once spare and elegant, with the usual great dialogue. Parker fans should enjoy it; newcomers, however, may want to start with an earlier novel.

Rating:
Summary: just plain bad
Review: How can a book that is at least 125 pages too long manage to have an abrupt and unfulfiling conclusion? Maybe if Parker would quit cranking out books like they were on an assembly line, he might produce a work that is at least entertaining.

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Summary: Witty Dialogue, an All-Star Cast, and a Showdown
Review: Potshot is an improvement over recent Spenser novels. There's more mystery here, the dialogue is in top form, and many characters you haven't read about in years are brought together. I particularly liked the way that Mr. Parker arranged the plot so that Spenser's strong feelings about the right way to do things would be apparent in a new way. My only complaint (why the book got four stars instead of five) is that the last two pages of the ending made no sense to me . . . except as an extreme form of irony. Surely, Mr. Parker isn't as ironic as this seems. Or is he? You'll have to see what you think. Those pages remind me of the ending of The Maltese Falcon in some ways.

Spenser is comfortably encased in his office in Boston when a new client enters, from Potshot, Arizona. The attractive Ms. Mary Lou Buckman has been recently widowed. Her husband was shot after having been threatened by a mysterious gang leader called The Preacher, who runs a protection racket. "They killed my husband." "He wouldn't pay the Dell any money." The local police are making no headway, and a mutual friend from the L.A.P.D., Lieutenant Samuelson, has recommended Spenser.

Arriving in Potshot (a cross between a refurbished ghost town for yuppies and biker heaven in the weeds), everyone praises the late Mr. Buckman, agrees that The Preacher had him killed, and offers no hard evidence. A woman in town begins vamping Spenser, and he gets a sense that some things are not as portrayed. During an interview with The Preacher, he becomes convinced that someone other than the gang killed Buckman.

Taking Susan for a West Coast swing to check things out, Spenser finds that the case is even hotter than he imagined.

Soon, he is assembling the ultimate A-Team of shooters to take on the 40 bad guys in the Dell (The Preacher's gang). You will find Vinnie Morris, Bobby Horse, Chollo, Bernard J. Fortunato, Tedy Sapp, and Hawk on the team. This section is a little briefer than would have been ideal, but there's good fun here.

The mystery and its resolution fit nicely into a typical small town Western plot.

Overall, the book has quite a range. Some sections are like shoot-outs in old Westerns while other parts have funny French and literary plays on words. As a result, this book has something for almost everyone and should be quite popular.

After you finish, ask yourself the question of how you can spot situations where there are more red herrings than real clues to the motives of those you are dealing with. How can you get past the red herrings? What questions should you ask? Mr. Parker's answer is that character will out. I suspect he's right. Look for character clues. If you can't find any, set up the situation to develop some. That's what Spenser's approach to sticking out his neck is all about.

Bang! Who's dead now?

Rating:
Summary: One more hit in the Spenser series
Review: Robert B Parker has a knack for bringing the reader right into the story he is telling. I have always been a fan of the TV series "Spenser for Hire" and listening to Joe Mantegna read Mr. Parker's work is one of the best combinations of reader and writer I have listened to in a long time.

Spenser has been hired to find out who murdered Mary Lou Buckman's husband in the wealthy desert town of Potshot. It is believed that a gang of misfits called The Dell is responsible but the more Spenser looks into it, the less he believes this to be true. Also, there are ties between The Dell, the murder and several people of the town's citizens. Is the sheriff really a good guy, what's the real estate agent up to, and what is a movie producer doing in this small town?

A group of the Potshot's leaders comes to Spenser and asks him to rid them of The Dell. In order to this, Spenser hires several of his own thugs. Each has his own special personality; - a Mexican, a gay, a Native American and of course, Spenser's favorite partner, Hawk, along with several others who have mob connections. Mr. Mantegna has the ability to give each character his own voice so the listener has no trouble knowing who is speaking. Spenser's long time squeeze, Suzanne is more than a little worried as he begins this case.

Mr. Parker's tells of the desert heat and makes it feel real. He paints a picture in words of the mountains and the people and the listener can visualize them in his/her mind from his well written descriptions. He has created each character in such a way that makes you think you might know a person like that.

The final chapter brings everything to a close but not in the way a reader might expect. Potshot is a story that is hard to put down until the reader finishes the book.

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Summary: Parker's Potshot is modern "Shootout at O.K. Corral"
Review: Robert B. Parker is my favorite author. I'm a prolific reader, so that's no faint praise. So when I was online ordering Potshot, Parker's latest in the best-selling Spenser private-eye series, Amazon's offer of another newly published Parker novel, Gunman's Rhapsody, was an easy sell.

As prolific an author as Parker is, with two other series already underway, the Jesse Stone cop novels and the Sunny Randall private-eye novels -- the latter a female version of Spenser -- Parker can never publish too often for me. I've read all his books and my only complaint is they're never long enough. I would avidly consume a War and Peace-sized tome by Parker.

Parker's Potshot was worth the wait while I consumed Gunman's Rhapsody. Potshot is number 31 in the Spenser series about the toughest of tough guys and his friends and enemies.

In Potshot, Spenser leaves his Boston turf to go west to the old mining town of Potshot, Arizona, collecting along the way a thug's gallery of friends and former foes turned buddies.

In fact, most if not all of Spenser's thug buddies first turned up in earlier novels as foes but were won over by the tough but humorous private-eye's winning ways. Even his oldest buddy, the menacing black underworld figure Hawk, first met Spenser when they were in the process of pounding each other into submission in a prize-fight ring many years hence. Joining Hawk and Spenser in Potshot are fellow Boston gangster Vinnie Morris, gay Georgia bodybuilder Tedy Sapp, California gangsters Hispanic thug Chollo and Kiowa thug Bobby Horse, and Las Vegas tough guy Bernard J. Fortunato.

It's a modern-day remake of "The Magnificent Seven" against a gang of 40 thieves led by an Ali Baba character named The Preacher, who is robbing and terrorizing the Los Angeles refugees now settled in Potshot.

Just figuring out just what everybody is really fighting over in Potshot takes up most of the tale, but trust Spenser, Hawk and the other members of this thug's roundtable to finally sort it all out.

Throw in a beautiful blonde as Spenser's client and another assortment of foes from the Los Angeles Mafia and among the so-called "good guys" in Potshot and you have yet another Spenser tale that comes slowly to a boil and erupts in a shootout worthy of the O.K. Corral.

As usual, the tale ends far too soon for this avid reader. The dialog alone between Spenser and his buddies is worth reading a second time.

Rating:
Summary: A Couple of Quibbles From Perfection
Review: With his sharper-than-a-machette dialogue, Robert Parker just can't write a bad book and this is certainly a very good one. But let's start first with the quibbles that separate very good from great, or 5 stars from 4 stars. This reviewer has two. The continual dirty innuendo talk with Susan (otherwise almost invisible in this book) has turned from cute to uncomfortable, and, for the third straight Parker novel, some of the villains escape justice. As he ages, is Parker just talking about sex and is he seeing the world in less certain terms? Whatever, his writing is as brilliant as ever and his plotting in this one is very good indeed, complicated and varied. Mary Lou Buckman, a beautiful blonde damsel in distress, comes to Spenser after her husband is murdered, she says, by a gang of outlaws terrorizing the idle rich in the getaway community of Potshot, Arizona. Spenser, drawing from his past adventures (read that novels), enlists the redoubtable Hawk and five other good-guy villains as a posse and the magnificent seven set out to clean up potshot. Of course they do and of course things aren't quite as they seem, but it's a journey you will be glad to have been along on when you reach the conclusion of this easy read.