Robert B Parker

New York Times bestselling author of the Spenser series of crime thrillers—Book 1 in the series
“The toughest, funniest, wisest, private eye in the field these days.”—Houston Chronicle

Spenser earned his degree in the school of hard knocks, so he is ready when a Boston university hires him to recover a rare, stolen manuscript. He is hardly surpised that his only clue is a radical...

Spenser goes back to school—to investigate corruption in college town. Taft University's hottest basketball star is shaving points for quick cash. And if Spenser doesn't watch his own footwork, the guilty parties will shave a few years off his life...

THE REDISCOVERED PULP CLASSIC!

Decades before Robert Brown Parker began writing his books about Spenser, a man named Robert Bogardus Parker (1905-1955) penned this extraordinary novel of post-war intrigue.

From the corridors and compartments of the Orient Express to the shadowy, ruined streets of Budapest -- which he saw firsthand as a foreign correspondent during World War II -- Parker takes you on a nightmare tour

...

Boone Adams: He was so smart he wrote half the English papers for the freshman class, when he wasn't getting drunk at night and waking up hung over in the morning. To him life was full of promise . . . just the ones it didn't intend to keep.
 
Jennifer Grayle: She was the campus golden girl, so rich, so pretty, that every boy wanted to take her out. Except Boone. He wanted to marry her.
John Merchent: He was tall and blond with blue...

“A novel of violence, crisp dialogue, and suspense. . . . The reader is immediately caught up in the ambience of danger.”—The Boston Globe
At forty-six, Aaron Newman was enjoying the good things in life—a good marriage, a good job—and he was in good shape himself. Then he saw the murder. A petty vicious killing that was to plunge him into an insane jungle of raw violence and fear, threatening and defiling...

Spenser, a Boston PI, is once again hired by April Kyle who was a teenage runaway that turned to prostitution. Now she is a madam of an up-scale, all-female operation that some men are trying to take away from her. April claims she doesn't know who is after her business, but Spenser finds ties to organized crime. Spenser without much surprise also finds that April, the thugs and everyone else involved is lying to him.

When Virgil Cole and Everett Hitch arrive in Appaloosa, they find a small, dusty town suffering at the hands of renegade rancher Randall Bragg, a man who has so little regard for the law that he has taken supplies, horses, and women for his own and left the city marshal and one of his deputies for dead. Cole and Hitch, itinerant lawmen, are used to cleaning up after opportunistic thieves, but in Bragg they find an unusually wily adversary-one who...

Everett Hitch and Virgil Cole track down Virgil's sweetheart Allie and the three head north to start over in the town of Brimstone. Given their reputations as guns for hire, Everett and Virgil are able to secure positions as the town's deputies. But a sanctimonious leader of a local church stirs up trouble at the local saloons, and as the violence escalates into murder, the two struggle to keep the peace.

When infamous actor Jumbo Nelson is accused of rape and murder, the Boston PD calls on Spenser to make heads or tails of the case. Although the evidence is mounting against Jumbo, Spenser makes a break when he teams up with Jumbo's bodyguard, Zebulon Sixkill, and uncovers some secrets involving the murder victim.

Sunny Randall, "Boston's leading lady gumshoe" (New York Daily News), returns as hired bodyguard for the spoiled, and possibly dangerous, prize female client of a sleazy producer. This time, she gets a little help from Parker's popular character Jesse Stone, making a guest appearance here