A Savage Place by Robert B. Parker
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

"It was a big sunny buffoon of a city; corny and ornate and disorganized but kind of fun. The last hallucination, the dwindled fragment of -- what had Fitzgerald called it? -- 'the last and greatest of all human dreams.' It was where we'd run out of room, where the dream had run up against the ocean, and human voices woke us. Los Angeles was the butt end, where we'd spat it out with our mouths tasting of ashes, but a genial failure of a place for all of that."

The poetic descriptions of Los Angeles are the best thing about Robert B. Parker's A Savage Place, (1981), the eighth installment in his Spenser series. The quoted fragment reminds me a little of my first visit to Los Angeles, in 1983, when I realized that I had never seen a city so different from all other cities in the world - absurdly huge, incredibly diverse, and incomprehensible in its strange and unique allure. The rest of the book is routine, formulaic, and mostly boring.

Rachel Wallace, whom we met in the sixth novel in the series, contacts Spenser and asks him to accept a job of guarding an LA journalist, Candy Sloan, who uncovered a scandal in the movie industry, and who fears that her life may be endangered. Spenser flies to Los Angeles, talks to Ms. Sloan and meets her male companion. The scene of moronic macho posturing and exchange of blows between the two men is painful to read; not because of the physical violence, but because of the utter stupidity of men trying to establish the "alpha maleness."

Ms. Sloan gets beaten, even before Spenser begins his guarding job, and the plot is getting quite serious. Yet, in a lame homage to Anton Chekhov and his "Chekhov's gun,", the author, at some point, mentions the space between the couch cushion and the arm of the couch, to have that space save his life a few pages later.

A cinematic climax follows - stereotypical yet well written. The slightly ambiguous ending and Lt. Samuelson's "Nobody's perfect" quip save the novel from a one-star rating. A small dose of humor helps:

"We were both naked finally, dancing on the balcony. The gun lay holstered on the table beside the cognac bottle. If an assassin broke in I could reach it in less than five minutes."

One-and-three-quarter stars.

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