Okay, if you want to know what I thought about the novel as a whole, click here. Or scroll past this post to the next one. I keep a hard no-spoiler rule around here, but I had to get something off my chest…
Robert B. Parker’s Revenge Tour
by Mike Lupica
DETAILS: Series: Sunny Randall, #10 Publisher: G.P. Putnam's Sons Publication Date: May 2, 2022 Format: Hardcover Length: 319 pg. Read Date: May 9-10
Seriously, don’t read on if you’re spoiler-phobic.
It was announced a few months back that Mike Lupica would be would be taking over the duites on the Spenser novels now that Ace Atkins has (regrettably) moved on.
In this novel, Lupica acts like that kid in December who has stumbled onto the place his parent’s have hidden his X-mas gifts. Unable to restrain himself, he’s taken a couple of them out of the box to play with a little bit before putting them back to await the 25th when he can unwrap them.
Hawk and Spenser show up in this book—Spenser is only around a little while, but we get a lot of Hawk. I’m going to hold onto my evaluation of Lupica’s treatment of them until the next Spenser book comes out, but I have to get something off of my chest about the fact he uses them at all.
This was a mistake. And it bothers me a lot. I admittedly care more about Spenser than I should, but that’s been true for decades, I don’t see why that should change now.
Robert B. Parker resisted a lot of pressure from fans (and I’d presume some from his publisher) to write something from Hawk’s perspective, knowing he needed to keep Hawk in the third person to keep some distance, something unknown about how Hawk thinks. Also, I remember him saying he didn’t want to see Spenser from someone else’s perspective, we only know Spenser from the way he describes himself/selectively repeats what others have said about him. *
* Yeah, we get a little from the Red Rose Killer’s perspective in Crimson Joy, but who’s going to take his description to heart?
The one time (and here I’m risking someone coming along and ruining this entire post, because I forgot something. Please be nice when you blow me out of the water in the comments) that Spenser and Jesse Stone intersected was in a Spenser novel. The Stone novels are third person, so while we get to see his inner life and thoughts, there’s still some distance—the same is true as he shows up in the Sunny novels that Parker and Lupica have given us. We were able to see what Spenser thought about Stone, but we only know how Stone reacted externally to Spenser.
And Lupica ruined it—we get Sunny’s description of Spenser. Sunny evaluates his attractiveness, size, age, and demeanor. It’s still subjective, because this is Sunny’s first-person narration, but it’s still from the outside. It’s as close to an objective vision of Spenser as we’re going to get*—and I didn’t want that. Parker set things up a certain way, and the authors that take on these series and the Estate that pays them to do so ought to respect those rules and play by them.
* Until Lupica brings Spenser to Paradise, because at this point, why not?
Sure, this means Hawk is fair game—and it’s true, he might as well be used. Although I still think of his appearance as a demonstration of Lupica’s over-eagerness to play with his new toys, and it bugs me a bit that he couldn’t wait. There was no reason not to use Spike or Vinnie Morris to do what Hawk did, heck, Ty Bopp could’ve done it.
But Spenser? That’s a bridge too far. It’s going to take me a while to forgive Lupica for that.
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