With all the action, they cannot find Susan. Those are intended to show how close they really are to each other. As they kill, Spenser and Hawk exchange bad jokes, mostly consisting of racial and ethnic slurs. The two of them start a real war, tearing the town apart. Our old friend, the evil right-wing billionaire, They start looking for Susan, who has disappeared. He gets into jail and breaks out with Hawk. Hawk is the black equivalent of Spenser, equally tough,Įqually lethal. She is in trouble, and his best (and only close) friend, Hawk, is in a California jail, charged with murder. Now, in his 12th book, Spenser gets a frantic note from Susan.

In recent books Spenser, that gallant archetype, has become something of a bore.

Can heĭo a few hundred one-arm pushups anymore? One doubts it. He indulges in depression and self-analysis. His girlfriend, Susan Silverman, has left him to seek her true identity in California. That, at least, was Spenser at the beginning. Here, he is the Travis McGee of the North. Why not? He is tall, handsome, as tough as you would expect a former prizefighter to be, well read, lucky in his girlfriend, efficient, lethal when need be and completely ethical - an eagle among men. He has become one of the more popular figures in the game. In case you haveīeen vacationing in Pec for the last 10 years, Spenser is the Boston private eye who first appeared in ''The Godwulf Manuscript'' in 1974. In the mountains so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than the other birds upon the plain, even though they soar.'' Spenser and his friend Hawk are the eagles. And even if he forever flies within the gorge, that gorge is There is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. Parker's new Spenser novel, A CATSKILL EAGLE, is taken from ''Moby-Dick.'' Melville wrote: ''And

A Catskill Eagle by Robert B. Parker