I've read most of the Spenser novels, and I think PALE KINGS AND PRINCES is definitely one of the better ones.

In this novel, Spenser goes to a small town to investigate the murder of a journalist, and discovers that the town is effectively controlled by a mysterious drug lord. What follows is the typical Spenser plot: lots of funny dialogue, romantic interludes with Susan Silverman, and exciting action scenes with Hawk.

PALE KINGS AND PRINCES isn't a great book, but it's very enjoyable and far better than the two Spenser novels that immediately preceded it (TAMING A SEA HORSE and A CATSKILL EAGLE). So if you enjoy Parker's writing style, I'm guessing you will find pleasure with this one.

Three and a half stars.

In this entry in the Spenser series, he is hired by a newspaper when an up-and-coming young reporter - Eric Valdez - is murdered while investigating the cocaine trade in Wheaton, Mass - a small town with a big reputation of being the Miami of the North. When Spenser starts asking around, he finds that no one knows nothing and that the police seem to be spectacularly unhelpful - and they, especially, seem to want him gone. They insist that Valdez's murder was due to his sexual peccadilloes and nothing else, pointing to the bodily mutilation as proof.

Of course, when people want Spenser gone - or when they want him to quit asking questions - that just makes him stick around and ask more questions.

When first the sheriff and then the sheriff's son are murdered - after Spenser catches the son smuggling cocaine, apparently for the town's biggest produce warehouser, named Felipe Esteva - the action begins to really heat up.

Was Eric Valdez killed because he was getting too close to the truth about the drug trade in Wheaton? Or because he was having an affair with the wrong woman? Why were the sheriff and his son killed?

This was a multi-layered and very satisfying book. Things that seem obvious turn out to be red herrings - things that appear to be obvious red herrings turn out to be truth. I loved it. Strong recommend from me!

There's no use trying to use a Spenser novel to conjure or cajole the sandman. Similar to TAMING A SEA-HORSE (#13 Spenser); PALE KINGS AND PRINCES (# 14) kept me up a couple hours in the middle of the night, beyond a silly hope of returning to sleepiness through a short time of reading.

PALE KINGS opened again with the standard realism of the detective doing his walk-alone-deal, accompanied by shiftless boredom and justifiable frustration. In this case, since the food in the rural community in which Spenser was detecting was so limp, and the clue extraction so dentally daunting, the private eye was able to drag/push himself through his solitary shuffles for only 1/4 of the plot before he called in Susan for a weekend visit of Salmon Loaf or Polish Platter at the Reservoir Court motel in Wheaton, Mass.

I was intrigued with Parker's feature in this one of how an individual gets himself seen as such, as a person instead of a thing. His technique of having Spenser gradually thaw out Wheaton's finest citizenry seemed similar to me to his methods of drawing readers into Spenser's games. This time, those games were a town's economic rooting into Columbian Coca/Cocaine, and the class spits accompanying the resulting population stew in Wheaton. As usual, I was mesmerized with Spenser's repartee with criminal codgers, which in this case were the top-of-the-food-chain of Colombian Drug Lords. I was especially impressed with the way the P. I. humanized these guys into seeing him as a worthy person, actually more easily than he set the standard-of-his-humanity with Wheaton's police presence, barkeeps, waitresses, librarians, and regular Joe's.

I wondered if that humanizing ability might be one of the mesmerizing character traits which has kept Spenser cozied within the reading hearts of so many faithful fans. Spenser dedicates himself to making everyone see him as a warm-bodied person, instead of as a bloodless character-stick in a plot of a novel.

Especially in the first scene with Esteva, the Columbian King Pin, PALE KINGS solidified for me one of the main reasons for Spenser's appeal. He's real. Duh? He works on each person in his presence (including the reader), until that person sees him that way.

I've noticed several times in this series (and more so in PALE KINGS), that exchanges between Spenser and his dialogue collections had him describing a person looking away, purposely not looking at him, until he wormed that person into his scene. Now I recall how often Spenser has noted the "covert looks" which Hawk draws out of people. Hawk, too, is real; his essence demands to be experienced as a person of potence as well as presence.

Is this part of what charisma is, a person who sees himself as significant, and therefore causes others to see him that way; a person who won't quit radiating and/or badgering, focusing on others until they LOOK at HIM and SEE him? Maybe, charisma also involves a person like Spenser or Hawk actually SEEING everything they look at, which in turn causes the "objects" or persons of their observations to connect to them as human beings as well?

Reading this novel began to congeal some of the illusive reasons I've searched for to explain my addiction to this detective novel series, especially since I've rarely been drawn, by natural preference (in the past), to read even the best examples of seriously authentic, male private eyes. Along with the mutual-personalization-syndrome noted above, and the mesmerizing ability of the literary style and perfectly-paced-plot drivers which keep me reading in the middle of the night; my addiction seems to involve the philosophical strands of golden threads which labyrinth through Spenser's sensual, sensitive, poetic soul. Each book I read brings up the question, "What key about life's purpose might I be surprised by in this one."

Yet, thankfully, the philosophical, psychological tapestries in the series do not diminish the dedicated dramatization of the basic detecting lifestyle, with its normal daily routines which are often uncomfortable, deprivation-intense, soul-leechingly boring, and inconvenient ... 90% of the time ... with the other 10% being "hairy" with high risk of deadly harm. In this case, the snow-challenged, dangerous denouement scenes in PALE KINGS were unusually complex and hairy, with Hawk, Susan, Caroline, Juanita, and Lundquist (a fantasticly heroic character) adding race, gender, color, Cause, and Creed to Spenser's righting of wrongs, during which we're privy to mesmerizing details of the process of a psychologist (Susan) doing a therapy catharsis.

Another part of Spenser which I came to understand more precisely here (and which I usually welcome with a whoosh of relief) was Spenser's clean means of sidestepping any character's effort to draw him away from true issues in percolation, into potential-black-hole-passions of politically correct causes. As usual, he sidestepped abruptly and adeptly, without dismissing or undermining the actual values in those causes.

Yeah, I suppose Spenser has it all, at least all that I require to continue following a pair of footsteps, in a process somewhat like a P.I. trailing a suspect or a clue.

Sometimes, I do have one.

Linda Shelnutt

An enterprising investigative reporter is killed in Wheaton, Massachusetts, a town known to many as the hub of cocaine traffic for the Northeast. The owner of the paper the reporter worked for hires Spenser to investigate the murder. He goes to Wheaton and gets nowhere at the start. Local police are obviously being bought off and when he asks questions the universal response is "nobody saw nothin." It is obvious who the drug lord is, so in an attempt to move his investigation forward, Spenser hijacks a major cocaine shipment. The son of the police chief was driving the rig, so his actions are of interest to more than just the drug dealers. Spenser then goes to the kingpin and offers to sell the cocaine back to him.
After the police chief and his son are both killed, Spenser befriends the grieving widow and enlists Susan to help her cope with her losses. Hawk is also recruited to help even the odds against Spenser. There is a final battle with Spenser, Hawk and an honest state trooper on one side and the drug dealers with their corrupted cops on the other. In an interesting twist, Hawk has a battle with a man (Cesar) that clearly was his physical superior, had he not held a small gun inside a mitten on his hand and shot first, Cesar would have killed him with his bare hands.
Once again, Spenser wisecracks his way through danger and remains noble in the completion of his job. When the drug lord kills the son of the police chief after Spenser hijacks the cocaine shipment, Spenser personally confronts his mother and only Susan can console him. She makes him understand that it truly was not his fault that the boy was involved in trafficking drugs and she will do what she can to help the woman. In terms of action and intrigue, this book doesn't have as many exciting moments as other Spenser novels. However, the dialog is excellent as always, which is why it still deserves four stars.

This one is definitely back on the track. Parker's last two Spenser novels just plain stunk. This would be better if he had managed to lose Selfish Susan permanently, but oh well.