Robert B. Parker's Bye Bye Baby

★ ★ ★ ★ 1/2 (rounded up)
This originally appeared at The Irresponsible Reader.
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Over the years, many things have changed about my profession. I no longer kept an actual landline on my desk. Since no one had called it since a little past the first of the millennium, I discontinued the service.

My superhuman ability to scroll through microfilm was no longer in demand. Almost anything I needed to look up, from old news stories, to criminal histories, to vehicle records, could be found online. Although I missed my visits to the Boston Public Library, I'd accepted the long, boring hours at my desk, thinking about how many old cases I could've solved with Google.

BYE BYE BABY

Looking for Rachel Wallace

Looking for Rachel Wallace

* Double Deuce, Thin Air, and Pale Kings and Princes jumped to mind as clearly political, too. If I let myself spend time thinking about it, I'd have no problem coming up with more.

The Widening Gyre

The Widening Gyre

* Oh, look, another one!

“Have you found any suspects?” Susan said.

“Nope.”

“Got any leads?” she said.

“Zip.”

“Planning on doing more than just poking around and annoying people?”

“Why mess with a winning formula?”

Lullaby

BYE BYE BABY

“You think these threats could be legitimate?”

“Maybe” [Wayne Cosgrove] said. “Hell, It only takes one person. It's just a goddamn mess to see through all the noise and bluster these days. Everyone is angry. Everyone has an ax to grind. At least in the old days, a nut had to roll a sheet of paper into the typewriter or paste together some jumbled clippings from a magazine. But now all they have to do is use a dummy email account and be done.”

“The perils of sleuthing in the twenty-first century.”