Bad Business

Bad Business (2004) Robert B. Parker

The danger in reading a Spenser book is that I then want to go back and reread all the other Spenser books. All 28 of them.

But as I reread them just a year ago, I’ll try to restrain myself.

Spenser takes what seems to be a simple divorce case, where he tails a cheating husband, until he finds out that someone else is tailing the woman involved with the adultrous spouse. And things get more complicated from there.

I really liked the idea of two different detectives tailing the different members of a cheating couple, then trading business cards. One has to think that such an occurrence has to have happened before, but I don’t remember reading anything like that before.

Because of the inevitable murder, we get a brief appearance by Healey, and another appearance by Quirk and Belson, but they were short parts, more for information than the interaction between Spenser and the cops. And we also get a brief spot by Rita Fiore who seems to be as good looking as ever.

On the other side, we get Vinnie. And lots of Hawk. Which is fine with me, because I love reading about Hawk, though I wonder whether I’d like a Spenser book as much if Hawk wasn’t in it. There’s something about the dialog with Spenser and Hawk that I love reading. Of course I enjoy all Robert B. Parker’s dialog, but there’s something about the banter between Hawk and Spenser that I just love.

Hawk showed up in my office just before noon with several sandwiches in a bag. he took one out and handed it to me.
“Six grams of fat,” he said. “I figure, I eat enough of these and I get to do one of those commercials.”
“Hawk,” I said. “You were born with two percent body fat, and you’ve trimmed down since.”
“So we lie to them.”
“We?”
“I thought you might want to get in on it,” Hawk said.
“I’ll eat a couple and see if my belt feels loose.”
“How ’bout coffee,” Hawk said.
“I made a fresh pot,” I said.
“When?”
“Yesterday.”
“Be fine,” Hawk said.

And as always, Robert Parker manages to come up with a bit that I absolutely love, like the bit about the newscasters in Taming a Seahorse. In Bad Business the bit that got me was this:

It was 5:30 in the morning. Healey and I were drinking coffee out of thick white mugs at the counter of a small diner on Route 20. I felt the way you feel when you’ve been up all night and drunk too much coffee. If I’d still smoked I would have drunk too much coffee and smoked too many cigarettes and felt worse. It wasn’t much in the way of consolation. But one makes do.

Perhaps it’s because I’ve spent nights drinking too much coffee and smoking too many cigarettes, but that passage evokes for me precisely that tired, wired, ill feeling better than any other book I can think of.
Rating: 7/10

• Browse the archives:
  
• Small Vices » »
• « « Illusion