Rating: 
Summary: Susan faces and conquers incidents from her past
Review: The initial premise of this novel is rather unusual. Brad Sterling, the ex-husband of Spenser's girlfriend Susan comes to her and asks for assistance in combating a sexual harassment charge being pressed by several women who worked with him on a charity fund-raising event. Susan then asks Spenser to assist in resolving the problem. The investigation involves high powered lawyers, major underworld figures, marital infidelity, and the usual group of characters in a Spenser story.
The plot is convoluted, taking many directions, leading to many possibilities as to who committed the two murders. There are several suspects, and the obvious ones are investigated. While there is always a great deal of emotion between Spenser and Susan in these stories, the involvement of her ex-husband intensifies the relationship. At the end, there is a showdown different from that of other stories, in that it is Susan facing down her past rather than Spenser confronting the perpetrator(s).
The story moves along very well and keeps you uncertain as to what the true circumstances are. It keeps your attention and the deeper psychological activity between the main characters is an element that makes it all the more interesting.
Rating:
Summary: Entertaining page turner with a bit of depth
Review: The other reviews I've read mostly covered the usual points, so I don't really want to belabor them. Spenser is his usual self, but that's what the readers want of a mystery series like this. I haven't read enough of the series to say, but the treatment of the relationships does more than superficial, but still rather archetypical and not the way most of us do things in real life. However, that's why we read escapist fiction, isn't it? From that perspective, the book succeeds very well, and I basically found it hard to put down, frequently being surprised to look up and see how quickly the chapters were flying past. An interesting structural or stylistic note is that the chapters are very short and highly focused. Almost every chapter is clearly focused on a specific and well-described event. Mr. Parker is obviously a very skilled craftsman, and I would be interested to see one of his outlines. Though I'm not an author of fiction, I suspect it would still be helpful to my writing. Not really a major beef, but alledgedly a major weakness of a mystery... Or perhaps I should make the fighter joke? I think he telegraphed his punch. It was pretty obvious who the culprit must be well before the end of the book. Though he had introduced a number of unsavory candidates, all but one had become implausible rather too soon. Some people might also take it as a minor beef that a few issues were left pending at the end, in particular as regards some of the peripheral criminals, but I actually considered that a merit and a sign of the author's mastery of his craft. Those threads were not important to the main story, and he knew it. His story was done, and he stopped writing, rather than taking a few more pages for a purely cosmetic and anticlimactic wrapping.
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