Promised Land

A wisecracking former boxer turned private investigator, Spenser is just settling into his new office when Harv Shepard, a beleaguered businessman, enters, looking for someone to help him find his runaway wife. Thus begins Promised Land, the fourth novel by Robert Parker following the exploits of the tough but cerebral detective Spenser. Why Harv Shepard's wife abandoned her family and to where she has disappeared comprise only half the intrigue, though, as Spenser soon discovers that Harv is a man in deep trouble, involved with a crooked loan shark and tangled in an ailing business venture. The case, fast-paced, believable, and absorbing as it is, is itself only half the story. The real reason the pages of Promised Land keep turning is Spenser himself. The information he gets about the case from police detectives, bartenders and local thugs is never quite as interesting as the way he gets it, with a bracing mixture of irony and sincerity that almost never encourages the people he encounters to like him. His wit is reflexive, and it seems to function irrespective of audience or situation. But his clever, often hilarious, quips have something more than self-amusement as their end, and that something more is precisely what makes Spenser such a compelling character. Beneath the air of insouciant detachment and irony is a quixotic concern, evidenced by his gestures and occasionally by his self-sacrificing actions. The people he encounters make predictable mistakes, they fall into traps he has seen countless other people fall into, and they are sure they can handle themselves when, of course, they cannot. Although he is weary of watching this pageant of human weakness and failure pass by him for the thousandth time, Spenser still cannot help but get emotionally implicated in his cases, numbingly predictable as they may be. The half-finished office that provides the setting for the novel's opening chapter is in some ways a perfect metaphor for Spenser himself. Despite his efforts, he is really only half a professional-money is what impels him to take the case, but money becomes a matter of almost complete indifference once he involves himself. Confident but self-effacing, prickly but sensitive, tough and cerebral, Spenser is a tangle of contradictions, and it's not hard to see why this character has provided Parker with such a rich fund of material.