“[Robert B.] Parker's brilliance is in his simple dialogue, and in Spenser.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer
A bitter divorce is only the beginning. First the father hires thugs to kidnap his son. Then the mother hires Spenser to get the boy back. But as soon as Spenser senses the lay of the land, he decides to do some kidnapping of his own.
With a contract out on his life, he heads for the Maine woods, determined...

Hawk is in jail in San Francisco, where he has gone to help Susan Silverman, who's in trouble. Susan contacts Spenser, but when he gets to California, Susan has vanished. Spenser breaks Hawk out and the two embark on a search for Susan that takes them back and forth across the country.

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.

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

...

The beautiful wife of one of the world's richest men comes to Spenser in the hope that he can find out what skeletons lurk in her husband's closet. Though he is a generous philanthropist and loving family man, she is concerned - he has recently become secretive, bordering on paranoid, and she wants Spenser to find out why. As Spenser digs into the billionaire's past, he realises that the man may have done terrible things to rise to the top - but he...

Henry Cimoli and Spenser have been friends for years, yet the old boxing trainer has never asked the private eye for a favor. Until now. A heavy-handed developer is trying to buy up Henry's condo on Revere Beach and sends thugs to move the process along. Soon Spenser and his apprentice, Zebulon Sixkill, find a trail leading to a mysterious and beautiful woman, a megalomaniacal Las Vegas kingpin, and plans to turn to a chunk of land north of Boston...

For Spenser, the job was another day at the office: a suspicious husband; a philandering wife; a hefty retainer. As often happens, the anxious spouse was right, but this assignment didn't end with separation or divorce; it ended with a triple homicide. And for Spenser, it didn't end at all. His routine snoop into adultery has aroused the ire of a terrorist sponsor who decides to wreak ghastly revenge by proxy.

Spenser takes up a seemingly open and closed cold case at the behest of a street-wise teen-age 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. When fourteen-year-old Mattie Sullivan asks Spenser to look into her mother's murder, he's not completely convinced by her claim that the police investigation four years ago was botched. Mattie...

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....

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 that's exactly what happened. This is Blackburn, Massachusetts, where zero tolerance for minors is a way of life. Leading the movement is tough-as-nails Judge Joe Scali, who gives speeches about getting...