Here’s how to tell that I love a book:
1. I drop everything else I’m reading.
2. I read the whole thing in one sitting.
3. It’s written by Robert B. Parker.
Last week, I got the latest Spenser novel School Days from the library. The Boston detective is hired to investigate a school shooting.
As usual in Spenser books, it’s pretty obvious that the truth isn’t hard to figure out – but almost impossible for people admit without Spenser’s help. He spends most of his time removing the roadblocks people put up to avoid the truth.
This book is different than most of the rest of the series: Spenser’s great love, Susan Silverman, is out of town at a convention. They talk on the phone a lot and are physically in the same room only after the case is resolved. (No spoiler there, because there’s no conflict in the relationship.) Hawk, Spenser’s frequent partner in crime busting, is nowhere to be found.
Spenser is on his own in this adventure, except for his dog, Pearl -- and that’s just fine. The others would just have gotten in the way.
This is a terrific book. The writing is up to Parker’s incredible standard with sparse dialogue and characters that come across as full and complex, even though Parker doesn’t devote a lot of verbiage to their description. At this point in his career, Parker is a surgeon of a writer – he cuts out all the unnecessary words. What remains is powerful and vibrant and a joy to read.
Spenser’s longtime friend, attorney Rita Fiore, appears a couple of times to help him figure out some legal stuff. She knows him pretty well, and they tackle a complex issue at the end of the book. The school shooting involved two kids, and Spenser worked only on behalf of his client – to the exclusion of the other kid:
“Tell me something,” Rita said. “You have stuck by this kid, who you barely know like he was your own. But you don’t seem interested at all in the other one.”
“Grant?”
“Yes. Don’t you suppose he might have serious problems that weren’t addressed? Doesn’t he need help? Isn’t he a kid, too? Should he spend the rest of his life in jail?”
“Nobody hired me to stick with Grant,” I said.
“That’s it?” Rita said.
“Yes.”
“That’s all?” Rita said.
“That’s all there is,” I said.
“No right or wrong, anything like that?”
“Right or wrong?” I said. “Rita, you’re a lawyer.”
“I know, never tell I said that.”
We were quiet for a moment.
“There’s thousands of people need saving,” I said. “I can’t save them all. Hell, I can’t even save half the ones I try to save.”
“So you let chance decide?” Rita said. “Someone hires you?”
“Chance and choice,” I said. “I don’t take every case.”
“How do you decide?” Rita said.
“I’m not sure,” I said. “I usually know it when I see it.”
“You can’t save everybody,” Rita said.
“And if I try, I end up saving nobody,” I said.
“And saving one is better than saving none,” Rita said.
That is a mere 207 words, and look at what they covered. Ethics, lawyer humor, philosophy. I wonder what the unedited page looked like! How many words did he cut? How many ideas were cleared away to make room for this?
Parker’s Spenser novels are just about my favorite in popular literature right now. I can’t recommend this book highly enough. If you like mystery, if you like good writing, strong characters, action, or intelligent dialogue, you’ll appreciate this book. It’s a prime example of the kind of fiction I wish I could write.
So read it already!
