While the rest of us grow older, Spenser seems suspended in perpetual early middle age. Oh, he talks about getting older, but his body is still firm, his muscles toned, and his reflexes are still hair-trigger fine. Even so, it is Spenser's body that betrays him when he is almost killed by an assassin's bullet two-thirds of the way through Robert B. Parker's latest Spenser adventure, Small Vices. Hired to discover the truth behind a four-year-old murder, Spenser soon runs afoul of "the Gray Man," who eventually shoots and partially paralyzes him. Spenser, his stalwart girlfriend Susan, and his almost mythical friend Hawk then hole up in Santa Barbara until the detective can get back on his feet again.

There's never any doubt that Spenser will get back on his feet, or that he will eventually track down the man who shot him and solve the mystery that started the whole ball rolling in the first place. What makes the Spenser mysteries interesting is Spenser himself, the thinking person's private eye, a man of honor and of conscience who understands that every action has consequences. --Tim Appelo

Spenser and Hawk are back, moving from the run-down ghettos to the elegant penthouses of Boston society as they try to prove the innocence of a young black man indicted for the murder of a white college girl. And then Spenser gets shot and is close to death... (Kirkus UK)

Peerless shamus Spenser's 24th case (Chance, 1996, etc.) is almost his last, thanks to an assassin who's a lot more like him than he'd like to acknowledge. Cone, Oakes and Baldwin, Boston's largest law firm, doesn't like loose ends, and when Rita Fiore and Marcy Vance, the former prosecutor who put Ellis Alves away for murder and the former public defender who couldn't save him from the big house, meet in the firm's tony corridors and share doubts about the case, they end up hiring Spenser to make sure the evidence is solid. Nobody, including Alves, a career criminal with an attitude about white folks, wants to talk to Spenser, but it isn't long before he smells several rats anyway. Why didn't the upscale couple (since married) who said they saw Alves drag Pemberton College coed Melissa Henderson into his car call the police till after Melissa was dead? Why would a lowlife like Alves have dumped her body on the well-tended Pemberton campus? Why do the parents of Melissa's boyfriend, tennis hopeful Clint, deny that they ever knew Melissa? Interesting questions - interesting enough to get Spenser the obligatory string of warnings by local thugs and crooked cops and a dead-eyed killer in a gray suit. But Spenser won't lay off, even though his personal shrink Susan Richman, avid to adopt a baby, switches to reminders that Ellis Alves undoubtedly belongs in jail for something. So the Gray Man comes after Spenser with his trademark .22, short-circuiting every surprise (hey, this isn't Nicolas Freeling) except the question of how Spenser's going to recover and nail his would-be executioner and the people who hired him - and then live with himself afterwards. It's a tribute to Parker's professionalism that he takes a device as old as Sherlock Holmes - the death and rebirth of the detective - and infuses it with renewed urgency and moral weight, showing the thoroughbred form that put him and Boston on the p.i. map in the first place. (Kirkus Reviews)

Ellis Alves is no angel. His lawyer says he wasframed for the murder of college student MelissaHenderson and asks Spenser for help. From Boston'sback streets to Manhattan's elite, Spenser andHawk search for suspects, including Melissa's richkid tennis-star boyfriend. But when a man with a.22 puts Spenser in a coma, the hope for justicemight just die along with the detective.

Spenser is hired to uncover the truth about the murder of a white student from ritzy Pemberton College. Did Ellis Alves, a bad kid with a long record really do it, or was he framed?. New York Times bestseller.

2008-05-07 The best Spenser novel so far!

I'm an avid fan of several of Robert Parker's heroes, particularly Spenser and Jesse Stone. The last Spenser novel I read (Hugger Mugger) was somewhat disappointing, but Small Vices has restored my faith! It's the perfect mixture of a great plot, the usual Spenser humour and the frailty of humanity when he gets shot and has to find a way back to his old self, both emotionally and physically. If you're a fan of Spenser you will truly love this novel.