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Summary: SPENSER IS STILL THE GREATEST EXAMPLE OF OUR SPECIES.
Review: I READ THIS BOOK LIKE THE OTHER 24 THAT HAVE COME BEFORE IT. THE BOOK TAKES US DEEP INTO THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN SUSAN AND SPENSER. I THINK THAT THIS IS THE MOST COMPELLING STORY LINE FOR A WHILE. THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN SPENSER AND SUSAN WAS SUPOSED TO FAIL: HOWEVER, JUST BECAUSE THEY HAVE THE PERFECT LOVE OF PEOPLE THAT SHOULD BE TOGETHER IT ALWAYS PROVES OUT. THESE BOOKS ARE NOT ABOUT MURDERS AND CASES, THEY ARE ABOUT A MAN THAT IS A REAL AND COMPLETE MAN THAT LOOKS AT THE WORLD, THAT IS NOT SO PERFECT AND ONLY TOO REAL, AND WISHES THAT HE COULD BRING THE REST OF THE PEOPLE THAT HE DEALS WITH TO HIS LEVEL OF HUMANITY. HAWK IS THE CLOSEST THING THAT SPENSER HAS EVER FOUND TO HIS SELF. BUT HAWK IS ALSO AT THE OTHER END OF HUMANITY THE WAY HE LEADS HIS LIFE. IT IS VERY INTERESTING HOW THESE TOTALLY DIFFERENT MEN, BUT THE SAME INTERACT. THE TRUE MEANING OF THE BOOK IS THE PERFECT LOVE BETWEEN A MAN AND A WOMAN. I HOPE THAT PARKER LIVES TO BE 100 AND WRITES A BOOK EVERY YEAR. I JUST ASK ONE SMALL THING..WHAT IS SPENSER'S FIRST NAME????????????
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Summary: SPENSER HOOKS UP WITH HAWK, AND WE HAVE A GOOD TIME
Review: HUSH MONEY Robert B. Parker Putnam $22.95 309 pp.In this latest installment, Spenser hooks up with Hawk for the entire novel: he also hooks up with Susan Silverman enough times to turn foreplay into fiveplay, sixplay, even sevenplay. Spenser fans need read no further to know that a lot of fun is in store for them. However, readers less familiar with this venerable series may need a few more facts. Spenser, the one-named private eye, has beaten up bad guys and bandied about bon mots on the bestseller lists for some twenty-odd years, in some twenty-odd novels. A poetry-spouting ex-pugilist with a gastronomic flair, he and his sidekick Hawk could waltz through the entire WWF stable without soiling their sartorial splendor. Hawk, imperturbable quick-tongued African American, was Spenser's "homey" before there was such a word. In HUSH MONEY, Hawk asks Spenser to help an African American professor at Harvard, denied tenure for spurious reasons; he supposedly spurned a young man who then committed suicide. As Spenser soon discovers, the professor was straight, and the boy was killed. Then, while Spenser carefully skirts the pitfalls of political correctness in the groves of academe, his main squeeze Susan entreats him to take on a stalking case for a friend of hers. Before long, Spenser finds himself treading lightly around the grounds of sexual harrassment, as the beautiful stalkee becomes his stalker. Spenser sets up the boy's murderer for he and Hawk to take out, while he sets up his stalker for Susan to take on. The plot here is as thin as the "villain." However, the real pleasure, the power actually, lies in Parker's wordplay, a form of homage to Spenser's namesake, the great English poet. When Spenser's stalker demands to know what's so great about Susan, he replies without a beat, "The way she wears her hat,...the way she sips her tea." When his nemesis calls him an "unutterable" unnameable, Spenser admires the epithet rather than be insulted. At his best here, Parker spins a three-page tension-filled stake-out around the word "guileful." And, as always, he has a way with the vernacular: Spenser notes that what they have "...almost sounds like a plan; "'Do,' Hawk said, 'don't it.'" Good writing about people who are good company makes for a good time, and a great read.
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Summary: Good issues, not quite hit upon squarely though
Review: For much of the series, the characters in Spenser books with the notable exception of Rachel Wallace are heterosexual. Of late, though, Parker has introduced detective Farrell, a gay, and in this installment, he examines attitudes toward the gay life style. One problem, though, and this is talked out in the book, is the fact that the majority of people Spenser meets are shady in one way or another, be they of a different ethnic background, or sexual preferance, or whatever. We do learn of an incident in Hawk's background along with a little more information as we meet his mentor and the mentor's son. Spenser actually is working two cases here, both pro bono, one for Hawk and the other for Susan. There's irony here. In a previous book, Spenser tried to help her ex-husband, and now for one of her friends. Both times, Susan finds herself betrayed by those she thought she knew. By the way, I notice more and more criticism lately of Susan Silverman's presence in the books. But she is an essential character. Spenser has a code of ethics and there are times that he feels he has to violate that code in order to do the right thing. This causes enough turmoil that, let's face it, the guy needs a shrink, but is very unlikely to seek one out. His falling in love with one neatly solves the problem. Hence, Susan. So the story has some failings, but basically should give you four or five enjoyable hours while you read it.
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Summary: Excellent Detective Fun.
Review: Hush Money was my first Parker read. It won't be my last. His name has been familiar for years, but until recently his books hadn't floated atop my reading pile. Now I know why he's so highly regarded in the mystery field. Here's what I discovered: Robert B. Parker is a master of dialogue. Virtually anyone who puts 80,000 words on paper is bound to come up with a clever phrase or two. Parker does it page after page. He has the uncanny ability to drop in the perfect comeback to every question and comment. Smiles and the occasional out-loud laugh are the result for readers. I haven't had so much fun reading a book in years. The main characters, private investigator Spenser and his black sidekick Hawk, are very strong and well-done. One could argue that the characters are stereotypes--even cliche'. But they are examples as good as you'll find: witty, brave, irreverent, strong, unpretentious, open-minded, fair-minded, loyal, sexually magnetic, appropriately violent, and clever. The shortcomings that prevent delivery of the fifth star are that Spenser's love interest, Susan, is too good to be true; Spenser's (and Hawk's) high vocabulary and reasoning are inconsistent with his blue-collar, average-guy image; and the plot is rather uninspiring. But that misses the point of this book. You read the book not for the gray matter challenge of the underlying mystery, but for the sparse and near-perfect utterings of Spenser, a classic, Chandleresque private detective.
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Summary: Parker has grown into a major writer
Review: Robert Parker has grown into a major writer. He began as a modern-day writer of hard-boiled detective novels -- one of the many heirs to the tradition of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Boston as the locale, Hawk as the sidekick, Susan as the confidante and lover -- these recur in title after title. But Parker has, on the whole, not succumbed to repetition: his characters have difficulties, grow, interact. Still, no one would claim that his grip on character is that of Chandler nor his insight into psychology is that of Ross MacDonald. Nor are his plots as intricate as many mysteries, but then hard-boiled detectives always -- Spenser is no exception -- subscribe to the dictum (Saul Bellow's line in another context, in HENDERSON THE RAIN KING) that "truth comes in blows." But HUSH MONEY reinforces what has been a growing realization on the part of Parker's readers: that he has become a master of repartee, or dialogue that is direct, crisp, witty. The joy of a Parker novel has become, in the past eight or nine years, the joy of encountering language that zips and crackles, as crisp and astringent as biting into a stick of cold celery. He is not unlike -- and this will be a strange comparison -- a Jane Austen for our age: his characters speak the lines we ourselves would like to speak, if only we were quick-minded enough and had a deep fund of cool and humor. We can be happy encountering great dialogue, and today only Elmore Leonard writes dialogue that is as much fun as Parker's. So like his other recent work, this novel is a joy to read. Yes, we get tired of the sentimentality of Spenser's perfect lover, Susan -- though re-encountering the interracial friendship between Spenser and Hawk, which never shirks from talking about race but remains intimate nonetheless, is a wonderfully refreshing phenomenon. It is both fun and enriching to see that, in contemporary America, it is possible for whites and blacks to be friends, friends who have no need to tip-toe around the shoals of American racial attitudes. Parker shows us what we as a nation can become -- what we as a nation, on the individual level, so often (and so unacknowledgedly) are. This is not the first time Parker has taken on an academic environment; but in this case he has things exactly right. His is a satiric view of the small-mindedness that often characterizes the academic world, a view which sees the pretentiousness and categorizing that are the dark underside of academe. In this regard, the novel fits nicely with Richard Russo's academic masterpiece, STRAIGHT MAN. So: for wonderful dialogue, a good look at the innards of academic life on a contemporary university campus, and one of the most sparkling friendships in modern fiction, try HUSH MONEY. You won't be disappointed.
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Summary: Heat
Review: A bit far out but if you need to waste time this is a winner.
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Summary: Spenser's most current, convoluted and complex case
Review: "Hush Money" begins with Hawk brining Spenser a client; Robinson Nevins, the son of Hawk's boyhood mentor, has been denied tenure at the University because of rumors that he was the lover of Prentice Lamont, a student and gay activist who committed suicide. Of course, as we have long come to expect with Robert B. Parker's novels in this series, no one will talk to our hero who eventually finds out the case is more and more complicated. There is also a secondary case involving a "friend" of Susan's, K. C. Roth, the victim of a stalker who finds our hero the proverbial white knight come to rescue her from any and all evils. This case gives Spenser something to do while the main case moves slowly along. The resolution of the main plot line is perhaps the most over the top resolution since the James Bondian climax of "A Catskill Eagle." I have spent the winter reading all of the Spenser novels in order and this has to be the most convoluted and complex case in the bunch and one of the few times Parker has really stretched credulity with me. Perhaps because I am defrocked college professor I have enjoyed Spenser's encounters over the years with various professors and administrators in their academic bastions (after all, this is where we started in "The Godwulf Manuscript"), but I have also appreciated the fact that such characters are drawn by Parker in lighter and darker shades of gray. "Hush Money" provides his best encounters which such intellectual denizens. "Hush Money" is a slightly better than average Spenser story. The high points of this novel are when Hawk finally reveals some details about his life before meeting Spenser and when Susan decks someone (she also warns them they will "be sleeping with the fishes"). This underscore that the strength of Parker's novels has been the relationships of the key players, even with the cases have been less than compelling. I started reading these books because a friend said I would enjoy Spenser's caustic, literate wit, but ultimately I looked forward to each book because the story of Spenser and Susan Silverman is one of the better love stories you can find in contemporary fiction. I almost always find myself more interested in the discussions between these two lovers than in the particulars of the case. I can do without our hero cooking in every novel, he does not have to beat up on somebody or contemplate the moral implications fo his actions every time around, and if Hawk is off in Burma doing who know what I can live with that, but a Spenser novel without Susan is one missing its heart.
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Summary: A Tale of Twos
Review: Hush Money is notable in a number of ways, and the number for which it is most notable is two. Most obviously, this may well be the first book in which Parker describes Spenser on two cases simultaneously. This has the advantage of keeping the action fresh; unlike the pig on the cover, the plot never gets stuck in the mud. It's a nice feature. But the other two which comes to mind is the number of books Parker has been writing each year. I feel this results in a lack of polish in his late work. His work would be improved by more focus on each book -- one per year is enough for most authors of quality work, and I think Parker should take that as a model. Hush Money is a decent read. Again, Spenser resists intimidation by the heavies. Again, Spenser resists temptation from a highly attractive woman. Again, Spenser and Hawk flex their muscle. Again, Spenser confronts controversial social issues. The usual. But the usual isn't bad. Parker's writing, his description and dialogue, are always enjoyable even if the stories aren't as fresh as they once were. If you're new to Parker, I recommend going back to the early works and starting the series in sequence. If you get this far, you're obviously a fan, have a lot invested in the characters, and you'll like Hush Money. But if you're a general fan of detective fiction, you might be disappointed by jumping right to his late work. It's more about character, more about social issues, and less about detection, mystery, or suspense.
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Summary: I have liked Spenser, but this was definitely disappointing
Review: I've read a lot of the Spenser books, and I've always enjoyed them, but this latest effort was below par. There seemed to be me to be two fairly substantial flaws: the absurdly unbelievable "resolution" that never gets sufficient explanation; and Parker's own conservative bent that really becomes obnoxious in this book. He takes on political correctness, but regardless of how he tries to let himself off the hook--"I don't really have anything against gays, it's just that all of them in this book are lowlifes"--it comes off badly, frankly. Liberal academics come off even worse. The Spenser series has always been as much (if not more) an opportunity for Parker's societal satire and commentary as it has been about detecting; but this time he made such straw men of his characters that the book suffered. On the plus side, the dialogue is as snappy as ever, which is why I've always enjoyed Spenser. I hope, having trashed academia (we really aren't all bad) and gays, Spenser, Parker and Hawk can take on some new, more worthy targets.
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Summary: Plot? Who needs a plot?
Review: A Spenser novel. Not much else to say. Parker can, as far as i'm concerned, write about Spenser for as long as he writes. An imperfect gentleman, an oddly-techniqued Boston detective, a good friend, a human being, Spenser is fun to read about and commiserate with. As pleasurable as himself are his friends, Hawk and Susan Silverman; both intelligent, knowledgable about people (from the opposite ends of the spectrum), and loyal to a fault, they make Spenser's life easier. There cannot be much higher praise for supporting characters. The story itself here involves Spenser taking on two separate cases pro bono for the sake of Hawk and Susan. Susan's concerns a friend who is being stalked; this provides much of the humour in the book as Spenser becomes stalked himself after she transfers her affections to him. Hawk's is the meat of the plot; it revolves around a professor, the son of Hawk's mentor, who has been unjustly denied tenure. This plot encompasses black/white, homo-/heterosexual, activist tensions and political correctness. Naturally, Spenser and Hawk are able eventually to penetrate the fog of anger, fear, and secrecy surroundig the denial of tenure. The actual resolution itself was a little disappointing to me, just your standard climactic twist, but this is really a minor quibble, since one does not read Parker for the plot but the characters; here he does not fail.
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