The Professional

Yesterday's trip to Coolangatta came about because a buddy and I do a six-monthly pilgrimage to a bookshop there. They import American paperbacks and have a range of 2nd hand mysteries unequalled in the state, although their stock is looking a little tired at present so we were a little disappointed. Nevertheless we managed to come away with some good purchases. I picked up Harlan Coben's second in his series "Drop Shot"; Michael McGarrity's "Under the Colour of the Law" - a New Mexico mystery; J A Jance's "Dismissed Without Prejudice" from the A P Beaumont series; A biography on the modernist sculptor Louise Nevelson; another on Ian Fleming and the creation of the Bond world; and Robert B. Parker's "The Professional" which I've just finished reading tonight.

I've been wading my way through 3 books concurrently: Daniel Schacter's book on The Seven Sins of Memory; Cubra Libre - an historical novel on the revolution in Cuba by Elmore Leonard and I've just started Karl Barth's 3rd volume of Dogmatics on Creation and Redemption on the advice of a mate (having now abandoned Volume 1 after a very tedious 40 pages).

The Professional by Robert B Parker is the 37th Spenser novel and is as smooth as silk with the traditional banter, old favourites in characters like Hawk and Susan Silverman (Spenser's Honey-bun) and an interesting case of a stud blackmailing four married women...  "Nobody was paying me to do anything. On the other hand, nobody was paying me to do nothing, either. Business was slow. I was nosy. And I had kind of a bad feeling about this long running mess that I'd wandered into and hadn't done a lot to improve." And soon,  bodies start popping up in true hard-boiled fashion, and Spenser's in for the final count.
An easy and quick read - particularly after some of the heavier books on the bedside table at present, and a book that won't stretch the genre or your vocabulary. But the read is enjoyable with Spenser at his wisecracking, beer-drinking, charming best. Not heavily laden with a syrupy overdose of Susan Silverman, Parker keeps the romance at a reasonable level this outing. The punches are a little telegraphed in the final chapters as we know who the killers are, but The Professional is one of the better Parker outings of recent years. Its a shame Parker died soon after this was published... it was the last book he saw come back in print before his untimely heart attack. Parker was among the top ten best-selling authors in the world, with between 6 and 8 million books sold. According to the published reports, Mr. Parker died at his writing desk and I suppose that is rather fitting. A Professional to the end.


Burn brightly, Pete