Spenser novels

Appie Knoll is the kind of suburb where kids grow up right. But something is wrong. Fourteen-year-old Kevin Bartlett disappears. Everyone thinks he's run away — until the comic strip ransom note arrives.
It doesn't take Spenser long to get the picture — an affluent family seething with rage, a desperate boy making strange friends...friends like Vic Harroway, body builder. Mr. Muscle is Spenser's only lead and he isn't talking...except with...

The Boston PI gets tangled in Cape Cod's criminal underworld in this Edgar Award-winning mystery from the New York Times-bestselling author. Cape Cod businessman Harvey Shepard is in over his head. He lost a quarter million on a shady real estate deal, the loan shark is circling, and now he needs a private investigator to find out where his wife, Pam, disappeared to. Spencer takes the case, but finding Pam isn't the hard part-the hard part is finding...

“Crackling dialogue, plenty of action, and expert writing.”—The New York Times
Rachel Wallace is a tough young woman with a lot of enemies. 
Spenser is a tough guy with a macho code of honor, hired to protect a woman who thinks that kind of code is obsolete. Privately, they will never see eye to eye.
But when Rachel vanishes. Spenser is ready to lay his life on the line—to find Rachel Wallace.
“A...

TV reporter Candy Sloan has eyes the color of cornflowers and legs that stretch all the way to heaven. She also has somebody threatening to rearrange her lovely face if she keeps on snooping into charges of Hollywood racketeering.
Spenser's job is to keep Candy healthy until she breaks the biggest story of her career. But her star witness has just bowed out with three bullets in his chest, two tough guys have doubled up to test Spenser's skill...

The adoring wife of a senatorial candidate has a smile as sweet as candy and dots her "i's" with little hearts. A blond beauty, she is the perfect mate for an ambitious politician, but she has a little problem with sex and drugs—a problem someone has managed to put on videotape.
The big boys figure a little blackmail will put her husband out of the race. Until Spenser hops on the candidate's bandwagon.
But getting back the tape of...

“His best mystery novel”—Time
Susan's letter came from California: Hawk was in jail, and she was on the run. Twenty-four hours later Hawk is free, because Spenser has sprung him loose—for a brutal cross-country journey back to the East Coast. Now the two men are on a violent ride to find the woman Spenser loves, the man who took her, and the shocking reason so many people had to die. . . .

“Ebullient entertainment.”—Time
A hotshot reporter is dead. He'd gone to take a look-see at “Miami North”—little Wheaton, Massachusetts—the biggest cocaine distribution center above the Mason-Dixon line.
Did the kid die for getting too close to the truth . . . or to a sweet lady with a jealous husband?
Spenser will stop at nothing to find out.
Praise for Robert B. Parker's...

Spenser smells corruption in a college town. Taft University’s hottest basketball star is shaving points for quick cash. All manner of sleaze—from corrupt academics to hoods with graduate degrees—have their fingers in the pot.
 
Spenser’s search takes him from lecture halls to blue collar bars and finally into a bloody confrontation with almost certain death. But Spenser must save an arrogant young athlete—even...

Ten years ago, Paul Giacomin's corrupt father and loose mother used the boys as a pawn in their violent race: only Spenser could call them off and straighten out the misled teen-almost getting killed in the process. Paul is now twenty-four and reconciled to his mother's wanton ways. But when Patty Giacomin vanishes, Paul begs Spenser to help him rescue her from the clutches of her boyfriend, a shady character he's sure coerced his mother into running.

...

Hired by Loudon Tripp, an aggrieved Boston aristocrat who believes his late wife Olivia's brutal street slaying to be something other than random violence, Spencer immediately senses that his client's picture-perfect portrayal of his family life is false. For starters, the victim's reputation is too saintly, her house is as lived-in as a stage set, and her troubled children don't appear to be the product of a happy home. Spencer plunges into a

...

When the bride of a Boston police detective vanishes, he hires Spenser to find her. His path leads from a New England college campus to glamorous L.A. Sports clubs. When the trail turns to a world of prostitution, drug abuse, and self-destruction, Spenser must enter ghetto tenements to continue his search. Ultimately, Spenser must hire a Chicago hitman to help him free the girl from a sociopathic ex lover. Working through gang leaders and corrupt

...

The bad kid from the 'hood has a long, long record, but did he really murder the white coed from ritzy Pemberton College? His former lawyers believe that he was framed, and they hire Spenser and Hawk to uncover the truth. Plumbing the depths of the seamy side of life, they encounter a no man's land of twisted cops and spoiled rich kids with peculiar private proclivities. When a master assassin's bullet takes Spenser down, he survives the attack

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PI Spenser investigates charges of discrimination made by a black professor who was denied tenure at a New England university. The professor claims there was a conspiracy to brand him as a homosexual. By the author The Godwulf Manuscript.

Boston P.I. Spenser heads west to the rich man’s haven of Potshot, Arizona, a former mining town reborn as a paradise for Los Angeles millionaires. This western idyll is being threatened by a local gang of desert rats, misfits, drunks and scavengers the police seem powerless to corral. Led by a charismatic individual known as The Preacher, this motley band of thieves selectively exploits the town, nurturing it as a source of wealth while systematically...

Renaissance man Spenser - he of the acerbic social commentary, the gourmet cookery, and the steely abs - turns his considerable talents to the unraveling of a thirty-year-old murder mystery. During a 1974 holdup in a Boston bank by a revolutionary group calling itself the Dread Scott Brigade, Emily Gordon, a visitor cashing traveler's checks, is shot and killed. Despite security-camera photos and a letter from the group claiming responsibility, nobody...

When Spenser's closet ally, Hawk, is brutally injured and left for dead while protecting booking Luther Gillespie, Spenser embarks on an epic journey to rehabilitate his friend in body and soul. Hawk, always proud, has never been dependent on anyone. Now he is forced to make connections: to the medical technology that will ensure his physical recovery, and to reinforce the tenuous emotional ties he has to those around him.
Spenser quickly learns...

Once upon a time, though not so long ago, there was a girl named April Kyle—a beautiful teenage runaway who turned to prostitution to escape her terrible family life. April Kyle’s return in Hundred-Dollar Baby is nothing short of shocking.
 
When a mature, beautiful, and composed woman strides into Spenser’s office, the Boston PI barely hesitates before recognizing his once and future client. Now a well-established...

Heidi Bradshaw is wealthy, beautiful, and well connected–and she needs Spenser’s help. In a most unlikely request, Heidi, a notorious gold digger recently separated from her latest husband, recruits the Boston P.I. to accompany her to her private island, Tashtego, for her daughter’s wedding. Spenser is unsure of what his role as personal bodyguard will entail, but he consents when it’s decided that he can bring his beloved...

The brilliant new Spenser novel from the beloved New York Times-bestselling author Robert B. Parker.
Called upon by The Hammond Museum and renowned art scholar Dr. Ashton Prince, Spenser accepts his latest case: to provide protection during a ransom exchange-money for a stolen painting.
The case becomes personal when Spenser fails to protect his client and the valuable painting remains stolen. Convinced that Ashton Prince played...

"Spenser takes up a seemingly open and closed cold case at the behest of a street-wise 16 year old girl, who believes her mother's murderers went free. As Spenser digs deeper into the mystery, he finds a much more dangerous and complex mystery than he bargained for"--

PI Spenser, knight-errant of the Back Bay, takes on corruption in the justice system in this stellar New York Times bestselling thriller in Robert B. Parker’s series.
 
What started out as a joke landed seventeen-year-old Dillon Yates in a lockdown juvenile facility in Boston Harbor. When he set up a prank Twitter account for his vice principal, he never dreamed he could be brought up on criminal charges, but...

"Boston PI Spenser and right hand Hawk follow a con man's trail of smoke and mirrors in the latest entry of the iconic crime series. After conning everyone from the cable news shows to the local cops, it looks like the grifter's latest double cross may be his last. Connie Kelly thought she'd found her perfect man on an online dating site. He was silver-haired and handsome, with a mysterious background working for the C.I.A. She fell so hard for M....

Hired by a desperate mother to search for a Hollywood starlet who has gone missing, Spenser and his former apprentice-turned-private eye follow clues to a powerful movie studio boss, the Armenian mob, and a cult-like empowerment group.

"Boston PI Spenser takes on a new case in this next installment in Robert B. Parker's iconic New York Times bestselling series"--