The Professional (Spenser Series #37)

by Robert B. Parker, Joe Mantegna (Read by)

Overview

A knock on Spenser's office door can only mean one thing: a new case. This time the visitor is a local lawyer with an interesting story. Elizabeth Shaw specializes in wills and trusts at the Boston law firm of Shaw & Cartwright, and over the years she's developed a friendship with wives of very wealthy men. However, these rich wives have a mutual secret: they've all had an affair with a man named Gary Eisenhower- and now he's blackmailing them for money. Shaw hires Spenser to make Eisenhower "cease and desist," so to speak, but when women start turning up dead, Spenser's assignment goes from blackmail to murder.

As matters become more complicated, Spenser's longtime love, Susan, begins offering some input by analyzing Eisenhower's behavior patterns in hopes of opening up a new avenue of investigation. It seems that not all of Gary's women are rich. So if he's not using them for blackmail, then what is his purpose? Spenser switches tactics to focus on the husbands, only to find that innocence and guilt may be two sides of the same coin.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780553545210
Publisher:	Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group
Publication date:	08/26/2014
Series:	Spenser Series , #37
Edition description:	Unabridged
Sales rank:	530,720
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 5.90(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Featuring rapid-fire dialogue and spicy characters, Robert B. Parker's books are top-shelf reading for fans of detective crime novels. His Spenser series is several titles strong and an established classic; lately Parker has raised the stakes with two additional series (one featuring private eye Sunny Randle, the other featuring police chief Jesse Stone) that may eventually rival his beloved Boston P.I.Parker passed away in January 2010 at the age of 77, following a successful career writing more than 60 books that audiences continue to enjoy. 

Joe Mantegna is a versatile, seasoned actor on both stage and screen; he first garnered national prominence for his work with writer-director David Mamet, earning a Tony award for Glengarry Glen Ross in 1983. He currently stars in the hit TV show Criminal Minds. Mr. Mantegna has become synonomous with Robert B. Parker's Spenser; he narrates the entire Spenser series for BOT. Mantegna is also the voice of Fat Tony on The Simpsons. 

Date of Birth:

September 17, 1932

Date of Death:

January 18, 2010

Place of Birth:

Springfield, Massachusetts

Place of Death:

Cambridge, Massachusetts

Education:

B.A. in English, Colby College, 1954; M.A., Ph. D. in English, Boston University, 1957, 1971

Website:

http://robertbparker.net/

Editorial Reviews

This case begins, as they often do, with a relatively simple assignment. Apparently, a lothario named Gary Eisenhower has been romancing and then blackmailing the wives of several very wealthy Bostonians. Spenser's job, if he chooses to accept it, is to persuade this lowlife conniver to cease and desist. When blackmail turns to murder, however, everything suddenly becomes more complicated and much more dangerous. Robert B. Parker's 38th Spenser novel shows that the master is still at the top of his game.

Bestseller Parker makes producing snappy banter look easy in his 37th Spenser novel (after Rough Weather). He also manages to draw new readers into the Boston PI's major personal relationships—with love interest Susan Silverman and friend/ally/bodyguard Hawk—without shoveling on the backstory. Spenser agrees to help a quartet of married women fend off extortion demands from stud Gary Eisenhower, with whom each has had an affair. Meanwhile, the husband of one of the women under blackmail threat hires some thugs to deal with the matter. The action takes its time getting to a dead body, but, as usual, the smooth, entertaining prose more than compensates for any deficiencies of plot. The absence of major personal developments for Spenser or his associates marks this as a less memorable entry than others in this iconic series, but it remains a solid, enjoyable contemporary detective novel. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

Not even Spenser's formidable gifts are equal to the problems posed by a charming blackmailer who kisses and threatens to tell. At least four women-Abigail Larson, Beth Jackson, Regina Hartley and Nancy Sinclair-have been photographed and tape-recorded trysting with Gary Eisenhower. Their only regret is that if he doesn't get $25,000 a month from each of them, he'll go to their older, wealthier husbands. While they're fretting about their limited options and Spenser is tracking the lover they shared to Pinnacle Fitness, one of the husbands, tough-guy financier Chester Jackson, gets wind of Spenser's inquiries and takes matters into his own hands, sending a pair of goons after Boston's favorite detective. Spenser can deal with the goons, at least at first, but he can't deal with Eisenhower, who blandly admits that he likes sleeping with married women, lots of them, and likes raising money from his amours even better. At length Spenser succeeds in orchestrating the kind of pressure necessary to make Eisenhower back down. But by then the case has already started to spiral, like so many of the PI's recent outings (Rough Weather, 2008, etc.), into something darker and more violent, something Spenser doesn't know any better how to deal with. Even after three characters have died and he's certain who killed them, he still can't figure out how "to make everything come out okay."Though Parker's flagship sleuth doesn't distinguish himself as either a detective or a problem-solver, his bewildered uncertainty is more touching and revealing than his customary machismo.

Kirkus Reviews

Actor Joe Mantegna delivers a one-man performance. Parker's hard-boiled Boston detective, Spenser, does his usual thing in solving a few murders while philosophizing, clobbering bad guys, and cavorting with his psychoanalyst squeeze, Susan, and scary (but here mostly absent) friend, Hawk. Opening and closing musical snippets comprise the audio enhancements; mostly Mantegna is on his own. He’s a strong narrator; the text flows smoothly, and the characters are precisely distinguished. The only distraction is Parker’s overuse of dialogue tags (more noticeable on audio than in print). The Boston milieu does not demand Brahmin accents but plain middle America. That's a plus. D.R.W. © AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine

FEBRUARY 2010 - AudioFile