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SMALL VICES
by Robert B. Parker
Berkley, March 1998
326 pages
$7.99
ISBN: 0425162486


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

In "Small Vices," Parker is once again at the top of his game. An inexperienced lawyer, now with a prestigious Boston law firm comes to Spenser for help. She believes that when she was younger and less experienced, she may have let an innocent though evil man go to prison. She has persuaded her firm to find out if she did that, or if the man, Ellis Alves, a black man with a long history of wrongful acts, is in fact guilty of the murder of a college student. The young white woman was found nude, not raped but strangled on the lawn of her small, expensive, Pemberton College. Enter Spenser.

The case quickly goes south (that's a colloquialism for going sour). Spenser finds himself going between high lifers and low lifes in Boston, its suburbs and New York city. He finds a thicket of lies, misdirection and lot of people who keep saying. the man, Alves, was a bad dude. If he didn' t do this, so what? He got away with other bad things so leave it be. Spenser, Hawk and Susan have some interesting discussions in this regard. But Spenser persists, because he knows that right is right and wrong is bad, no matter how bad is the wronged man. We all know it too, when we stop to think about it, although it is sometimes hard to remember when we are confronted with the latest real outrage in our daily newspapers. But that's part of the genius of Robert Parker. So Spenser persists in asking questions and the lies get thicker and the facts become hazier and some even transparent.

And then a stone killer with a .22 appears on the scene, sending Spenser and company west.

Yes, Susan is here. Yes Pearl the wonder dog is here. Yes, Hawk is here. The dialogue is snappy, sometimes tongue-in-cheek. Parker takes himself and his craft seriously but never too much so. The pace is as always, satisfying, the characters are clear to us, the messages are appropriate and always, always delivered in such a way that they never preach or get in the way of the story. This one is about as good a PI mystery as you'll get.

Reviewed by Carl Brookins, July 2003

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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