Rating: 
Summary: Reliable Fare
Review: This is the typical Spenser novel - same great characters: Spenser, Susan and Hawk + good story line and humor. Parker does smart tough guy dialogue as well as anyone. Spenser's self-deprecating humor always rings true.So why only three stars? There is nothing to distinguish this book from any of the other Spenser novels. The plot was fairly good, but so are all of the books in this series. It is -as are all the Spenser novels - goos light reading.
Rating: 
Summary: "It's still the same old story, a fight for love and glory."
Review: We'll never tire of Spenser. I'm pretty certain of that. Even when we know the guy's going to end up being 80 years old, still checking out the babes, beating up the bad guys, with an emotional United Nations of friends and camp followers, even then we'll always enjoy his company for a few hundred pages. Here he hooks up with an old flame, Rita Fiore, tries to help her client, the incredibly dumb Mary Smith, hangs with Cimoli, Quirk, Belson, Vinnie and Hawk, has his ashes hauled as usual by the ever size 5 Susan, and in the end, well, you know. One disappointment for me was that he doesn't seem as sad as he used to be once faced with the darker side of the whims of life. As a consequence, Susan's sadness at the suicide of one of her patient's seems almost trite, certainly unnecessary. But it's Spenser being Spenser. Hard to beat the early Spensers, but the recent ones ain't too shabby either. This one, "Widow's Walk," is one of the better novels of Parker's cast in the last ten years. Nevertheless, if you're new to the quintessential PI you shouild start with the early ones. These are some of the best mysteries in the last 50 years. Like the game we would play when we were kids, if you were going to take 10 mysteries with you on a deserted island, three would be by Parker written before 1985, possibly Gudwulf, Rachel Wallace, Ceremony, God Save the Child or A Savage Place. But as Watson would tell Holmes, I digress. Spenser fans won't be disappinted in Widow's Walk.
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