Author Robert B. Parker passed away in January of 2010 (which I wrote about here) and since then I’ve slowly but surely been working my way through the remaining books he wrote during his lifetime. On Friday I finished Sixkill, his final novel and honestly, it was a little bitter-sweet.
The story features his main protagonist (Spenser – a Boston Private Investigator) attempting to solve the murder of a young girl who was found dead in a hotel with a movie star named Jumbo Nelson. Like all of his books, I found it engaging, full of action and great one-liners. For me, these novels work best as a character study of the main character. Spenser sits for me as one of my favourite detectives in fiction (the others include Brother Cadfael, Sherlock Holmes, and Miles Vorkosigan) as he comes across as a bit of thug, but at the same time has one of the most straight-forward views I’ve ever come across in fiction. If there is a problem, he works to solve it, if he can’t solve it directly; he sits around and makes trouble until there is something he can do.
It’s funny, but as I was heading through the last few chapters of the book I kept taking pauses (I was reading on the bus and would wait until the bus made its next stop), I was really enjoying the story, but knowing that this would be my last first-time reading a Parker novel, I really wanted to savor it, and you know what.
That guy could really write.
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