Reading James Baldwin and Terrance Hayes about racism in America, Nathan Thrall about Palestinian life under the Occupation, and Sofia Sinclair about British colonial brutality in Jamaica, I desparately needed something easy, entertaining, quick, and light for a break.  Enter Robert B. Parker!

I have read all of Parker’s Spenser/Hawk/Susan Silverman books, and despite a major culling of my mystery library a few years back, I still have most of them on the bookshelf in our Vermont guest house. When I feel the need for a break from the heavy reading, I wander up there, pick one at random off the shelf and dive in.

Yesterday was one of those days, and I opened ‘Back Story’ at 10AM and closed it at 6PM–the perfect reading day!  So sad that Parker is gone, since every one of his books hits the mark and has personal connections for me. Susan Silverman lives on Linnean Street, just blocks from us in Cambridge.  Spenser eliminates three bad guys during a night time chase that takes place in the Harvard Stadium right across the Charles from our house.  The head of the Boston FBI office is named Epstein.  The murder victim was in the college Class of 1967, my very own.  Spenser cites some of my literary favorites—Hemingway, Shakespeare, and so timely this month, Fitzgerald’s Gatsby!

And the dialogue and give and take is as sharp, clever, and funny as always.  Anyone that can write a sentence like this, deserves to be read: “I had just killed three men, two of whom I didn’t know.  What kind of business was I in, where I had to kill three men on a pleasant moonlit night in an Ivy League football stadium?  Hope tomorrow isn’t parents’ day!  There had been two people at Taft College awhile ago.  If I shot anyone else on a college campus, I’d probably be eligible for tenure.” 

The plot is a little silly and not worth summarizing, but the reading was great fun. I’m ready now to return to reality—racism, the Middle East, and all the prejudice that warps our world.