baylink's Full Review: Robert B. Parker - Double Play
"oh my!".
I've tried a couple of Parker's singleton novels over the couple of years since I found and fell in love with Spenser (I've even just managed to finally buy Hawk's car. Ok, mine's an 87 635, and his was an 89 M6, but who's counting?) but they didn't do too much for me, which is largely because they're "too" period -- I'm not big on Westerns, and the hardcore noir detective novels don't really suit my tastes either.
But _Double_Play_, on the other hand, was a comfortable read for me for the same general reason I like his series books, and Spider Robinson's series, and all the Heinlein books: it treads familiar ground, albeit in someone else's yard.
Remember all those old baseball players and teams Spenser's always mumbling to himself about while he waits to get arrested?
That the neighborhood this book travels to.
It's the story of Jackie Robinson's first year in the major leagues, and the notional bodyguard Branch Rickey hires to protect him; an ex-Marine named Joseph Burke. Burke's seen some schidt in his life, and been through some more, and doesn't much care about anything or anyone when the story starts... for reasons we learn much of in two levels of flashback interludes interleaved amongst the first few chapters. (What's a pentimento? :-)
Mostly, this is a character study; there are incidents, but they don't really advance the plot so much as they provide the white bodyguard and the black major-leaguer an excuse to be thrown together and learn to understand one another.
Burke is roughly what you'd get if you threw Spenser and Hawk in one of those mad-scientist machines: he's not especially concerned with what he has to do to beat the bad guys, though he does make a distinction between them and the good ones... and he'll make the occasional deal with a bad guy in the pursuit of The Right Thing.
I suspect if you like the Spenser, Sunny and Jesse series, you'll probably like this one too. And if not, there's another Sunny coming in November. :-)
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