Although this is one of the strongest Spenser novels in recent years, perhaps Parker called it Back Story because so much of it is so familiar. Spenser's surrogate son, Paul, shows up with an actress friend who wants Spenser to investigate her mother's death, as an innocent bystander when a radical group robbed a bank, some 30 years earlier. Which is, coincidentally, just about the time Spenser started detecting around Boston, and maybe it's because I'm old enough to remember those days, but the radical gang could've been characters right out of George Higgins' Friends of Eddie Coyle. Time, the passage thereof, is an increasingly sensitive subject for the world's most sensitive tough guy. Pearl, the Wonder Dog, has died offstage since the last Spenser novel, sparing the audience many tears, but her replacement, Pearl II, is every bit as cute, so cute in fact I'm surprised Spenser doesn't get another dog called Knit One to go with her. Of course, in Boston, it's detectives who age in dog years, not dogs. Of course, the death of an innocent bystander turns out to be anything but, and as the investigation delves deeper into the past more and more familiar scenes pop up, not least when hitman Vinnie Morris and a couple of local gangstas are recruited to protect Spenser's fair queen, Susan. She's so used to this by now that when someone says her apartment has a homey feel, she thinks of hooded sweatshirts and automatic weapons. There's even a guest appearance by Paradise, Mass., chief of police Jesse Stone, who manages to refrain from referring either Spenser or Hawk to a psychotherapist. The story peters out into a resumption of the status quo, as so many Spenser books have done recently. Could Parker's soft-centred hardboiled hero be turning cosy on us after all these years?
