After reading several books set in Nazi Germany and the unsettling “The Trees” by Percival Everett, I was in need of something lighter to take my mind away from the Holocaust and lynchings in the American South.  Enter Robert B. Parker.

Parker, who shares my birthday though born 13 years before me, wrote 40 Spenser novels along with a number of books about Sonny Randell and Jesse Stone the former a PI and the second a police chief, and the Western cowboys Virgil Cole and Everett Hitch.  I have read all or nearly all of the Spenser books, and many sit on the bookshelves in our guest house in Vermont, always available should I need a respite from heavy reading.  Enter, “Cold Service” which did the trick admirably.

The book starts with Hawk, Spenser’s Black colleague, in the ICU having been shot three times in the back while trying to protect a Black numbers runner from the Ukrainian mob who is trying to take over Marshport, a predomiantly Black city of 80,000 on Boston’s North Shore.  The book tells the story of how Hawk and Spenser get revenge on the Ukrainians, free Marshport from its evil mayor, and establish a trust fund for the slain numbers runner’s only living child.

The action is fast and furious though the book contains much too much of Susan Silverman’s shrink talk and analysis of the drive that motivates both Spenser and Hawk.  Despite that, this is one of Spenser’s good ones, written only five years but many books before his sudden death at his desk in Cambridge, just blocks from our house in 2010.

The winner of The Grand Master Edgar Award and the Gumshoe Lifetime Achievement award along with a slew of other Edgar awards and an Emmy nomination, Parker influenced an entire generation of mystery writers.  I miss him, and having tried some of the books that were written in his ‘name’ and style by writers selected by his late wife, I plan to avoid the latter and stick to re-reading his old ones when I need a break.