Big Three: Lunch with a beer, a good cigar and Robert B. Parker

The best benefit of working at home a few days a week is lunch breaks. As long as the lovely fall weather holds, I'm still enjoying the pool deck with a low-carb Bud Select 55, a good cigar and today, the next-to-last Spenser novel by Robert B. Parker, which arrived from Amazon yesterday.

IMHO, the late Robert B. has no peers and mighty few authors even in the same ballpark. I just finished the next-to-last Spenser novel, Painted Ladies, and what a stem-winder to close out this great character.

By plot's end, we have six dead bodies littering the terrain in and around Boston, two of which were dispatched by Spenser personally. Robert B. finished this one in the year before he died and it is evidence that his genius for sparkling dialogue and taut action had not dimmed.

There's one more Spenser novel yet to be published in May, Sixkill, which I've also pre-ordered. I'm certainly looking forward to that with great anticipation, but also with much sadness. I hate to see Spenser go.

Maybe in the last one, we will finally find out what Spenser's first name is. Or what Hawk's real name is. But most likely we won't. More likely we'll have to do what Iris Dement sings, "just let the mystery be."