Paper Doll

“Quirk flashed his badge, and put it away. It could have said Baker Street Irregulars on it, for all the clerk had a chance to read it.” Falling where this does within the Spenser canon, two books down the road from Pastime — where you could sense an undercurrent of Parker’s regret at changing the fo......more

I like Paper Doll more than most later Spenser books, because of what it has, and because of what it doesn’t have. Let’s start with the “doesn’t have” part. Paper Doll doesn’t have some former kid—April Kyle, say, or Paul Giacomin—wandering in from some old Spenser book with a new problem. Paper Doll......more

As far as the story goes, I’d say the book is only middling and not altogether believable. Robert B. Parker was fantastic with the snappy dialogue, a Dashiell Hammet or Raymond Chandler for the late twentieth century. For that I have no problem rating this four stars. He does best in his home territ......more

A well-crafted mystery by the master. In Paper Doll, Spenser investigates an unsolved murder and follows all sorts of twists to discover everyone has been lying, appearances are all false, and the motive is not one he had considered. This novel has much less of the Parker-signature macho BS. Hawk ha......more

Apparently the years of drinking improperly distilled corn liquor have caused more damage than I thought because I had previously rated this as one star and marked it as the place the Spenser series went off the rails. Actually, it’s not that bad at all. Olivia Nelson was the wife of Boston blue bloo......more