Robert B. Parker’s
Little White Lies,
by Ace Atkins(G.P. Putnam’s Sons)
Reviewed by Tom Andes
The real theme of the late Robert B. Parker’s Spenser novels was masculinity, and as the series and Spenser’s relationship with girlfriend Susan Silverman progressed, the paradoxes and pleasures of monogamy. Like John D. MacDonald’s series character Travis McGee, Spenser was self-consciously created as a latter-day knight errant, his name a reference to Edmund Spenser, author of The Faerie Queen, and the titles of many of Parker’s novels cribbed from the English Romantics (before becoming a full-time novelist, Parker was an English prof). A red-blooded American male who’d served in the Army, a former cop and boxer who worked out several hours a day and liked his steak medium rare, Parker’s Spe
