Sixkill

It is with renewed sadness at the death of Robert Parker that I read this last book he wrote in the Spenser series. The dialog is always one of the main draws for me and this book just reminds me how much I enjoy the conversations between his characters. Spenser is asked by Quirk to look into the death of a young woman who appears to have died while having sex with movie star Jumbo Nelson. Everyone wants to hang the death on Jumbo--the press, the family, even the studio--because Jumbo is a thoroughly unlikable guy. But Quirk isn't so sure that justice would be served with this verdict and Spenser agrees to help, especially when he finds out that Rita Fiore, who is perpetually trying to seduce him, has been hired to defend Jumbo. But Spenser's unstoppable smart mouth pisses off Jumbo and he fires them both. That won't stop Spenser of course, because he's doing this for Quirk. Spenser knocks out Jumbo's bodyguard, a native American named Zebulon Sixkill, and so Jumbo fires him, too. Spenser takes Zee on as a project, teaching him how to box and maybe how to get off the dope and booze.  The pair become the target of some people who don't want Spenser to look into the matter any further, but the bad guys are never any match for Spenser and his new backup man. Hawk is missing from this one, supposedly off in Asia somewhere, but a number of other familiar and slightly shady allies show up in the course of the investigation, and of course Susan and Pearl are present and accounted for. Zee has a sly sense of humor based on his native ancestry and seems to serve as a conversational stand-in for Hawk. We get glimpses into episodes of his past through entries interspersed  between chapters--a different device for revealing character than I have seen in Parker's book previously. A righteous installment in the Spenser series, if a little bittersweet.