Bruce Von Stiers

There is a new Spenser novel out. This one pits Spenser against a locked room mystery. In his typical laid back, yet forceful manner, Spenser gets to the bottom of things. The title of the book is Widow’s Walk. It was published by G.P. Putnam’s Sons and written by Robert B. Parker.

Nathan Smith is dead. His young and beautiful widow, Mary, is being accused of his murder. She claims she found him in his room, dead, with a bullet in his head. She was elsewhere is the house watching television. A highly suspicious alibi. Spenser is hired to keep the widow Smith out of jail and find out who the killer really is.

I remember getting into the first few Spenser novels when they came out. I read the first one and kind of got hooked. Just when you thought that things were getting a little stale, Parker would introduce a new character or do some twisting and turning of plots to add a new wrinkle. The television show based on the books even did very well.

One of the plot devices in the show had Spenser get detached from his lady, Susan Silverman, and take up with Assistant D.A. Rita Fiore. The Spenser novels never really took that approach, although Parker has added Fiore as a minor character in a novel or two. She is in this current one. Rita is now on the other side of the fence, being an attorney in private practice. Her firm is representing Mary Smith. Rita wants Spenser to find out what really happened to Nathan Smith.

Spenser finds that working for Mary Smith is not a piece of cake. First of all, Mary is beautiful but pretty dense. Could she have murdered her husband? Probable but not likely. Did she have someone do it for her? A criminal is insisting that she tried to hire him to kill her husband. And why did Nathan Smith have a partner at his previously family owned bank? Spenser finds things about Mr. Smith that he’d rather not have known.

Spenser is shot at, attacked and bribed. This makes him more determined than ever to find out who really killed Nathan Smith and why.

Widow’s Walk is one of those mysteries that you can figure out fairly early on. In some ways, the Spenser books are more crime novels than mysteries. Spenser’s associates definitely skirt the edge of the law. Hawk is big, bad and watches Spenser’s back. Vinnie Morris was deadly with a gun and calls Spenser his friend. And the beautiful Susan Silverman is there to hold his hand.

Widow’s Walk isn’t the greatest detective novel ever written. But it is pretty decent. Spenser is one of those guys who seems rough around the edges until he speaks. He gets to the bottom of Smith’s death, but not without a lot of blood spilt and bullets spent