Walking Shadow by Robert B. Parker
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

"'What's the hurry? We have the rest of our life to do this.'
'You know perfectly well that I am always in a hurry.'
'Almost always,' I said.
'Except then.'"
(A snippet of Spenser and Susan's banter.)

Robert B. Parker's Walking Shadow (1994), the twenty-first installment in the long-running Spenser saga, is - in my view - one of the weaker novels of the series. It seems that the unremarkable plot serves only one purpose: to give the reader a pretext to meet the four recurring characters again: intrepid, intellectual, athletic, and very manly Spencer, his psychologist partner Susan Silverman, PhD, his infinitely cool close friend Hawk, and Vinnie Morris - the best shot in the entire Universe (well, in Boston).

Spenser and Susan come to a coastal Massachusetts town, where Susan is a board member of a local theater company. The artistic director of the company suspects he is being followed; Spenser's task is to catch the stalker. Soon things get more serious: when Susan and Spenser watch a play in the theater, someone shoots one of the actors to death. Naturally, Spenser undertakes the murder investigation for the theater company.

The town has a huge Chinese population - including many people without legal immigration status - and Spenser learns that it is actually the tong that wields the power in the town. Spenser's investigation bothers the tong's bosses and he is threatened with death if he does not stay out of their affairs. Which explains the appearance of Hawk and Vinnie. And - as Anton Chekhov might say - once Vinnie shows up in the novel, there will be shooting at the end.

Instead of following the feeble plot, I have focused on finding funny passages and nice prose fragments. Like the following one:

"[...] looking at the people moving past us, and they seemed to me for a minute as they must have seemed to Herman Leong all the time: insubstantial, and temporary wisps of momentary history that flickered past, while behind him was the long, unchanging, overpowering weight of his race that bore upon the illusory moment [...]"

As to humor, in addition to the epigraph quote, the reader can find a few hilarious passages of sexual innuendo like, for instance

"'Do you wish my flower were like a polished pearl?' Susan said.
'I'm an old-fashioned guy,' I said. 'I prefer the original, so to speak, unprocessed model.'"

The Chinese graduate student, Mei Ling, who serves as Spenser's interpreter, is the most memorable character in the novel. There is also a thin layer of seriousness about the "have-nots" and racial conflicts in the society: Spenser is stunned by the subhuman living conditions of Chinese immigrants in Massachusetts. The reader may also be surprised by how much the language standards have changed in the recent years: the book was published only 27 years ago, yet I am afraid it would be criticized today for "insensitive language."

Two-and-a-half stars.


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