Mystery Superior - one this good does not come out often
Comments:
January 19, 2010 – Robert Parker died today of a heart attack while he was in his office writing. I guess everyone has to go sometime and it is sad that such a great author should die. It is a great loss. But it is appropriate that he was writing when his time came. We will miss him.
In this latest Spencer mystery he takes on a case involving a group of four ladies who have been approached by a lover demanding money to keep him from letting their husbands know about the affair they have all been having with him. It seems this man is a really great lover, very handsome, funny and personable. But, he likes the ladies, especially the ones already married to very rich men. He uses them and then blackmails them.
First Spencer has to find the man, which turns out not to be so easy since none of the girls know where he lives or even what his real name is. But Spencer manages to locate him and confronts the man. He is unable to call the man off by threatening him or reasoning with him so he informs the ladies that they have two options. One, they can go to the police and swear out a complaint charging him with blackmail and confess their guilt, or Two, they can come up with a large sum of money and buy him off. They, of course, don’t want to do either. That seems to be the end of it for Spencer.
But Spencer cannot leave it alone so he keeps digging for information. It gets complicated by the fact that one of the girl’s husband is a local gangster. But Spencer is pretty tough himself. He works with another local gangster friend of his and manages to call the girl’s husband off from wasting the young lover.
But then the gangster husband is murdered. Then one of the lover’s mail girlfriends is murdered. Then Beth, the wife of the gangster is murdered. Spencer has a time figuring it all out but in the end he manages to find out the complex set of sexual relationships and manipulations of personalities to know who did what and when they did it and why.
It is a very quick moving and exciting story that you will probably read in one or at most two days. Since this is probably one of Parker’s last novels I am going to give it the highest 10 out of 10 rating on the Weaver scale. It really is worth it.
