Pretty good ?Spenser? detective story

First edition as new

A cop friend of Spenser's has been shot, and his wife has disappeared. Spenser is on the trail. Parker uses a little different style here, with about half the book told from the POV of the missing woman, whose character is developed much more fully than the usual damsel-in-distress types. ( )

Thin Air is Robert B. Parker's 22nd Spenser novel. It was published in 1995. When Boston police detective Martin Quirk's wife suddenly disappears Spenser is asked to find her. The author uses a narrative device I had not seen him use in Thin Air. While Spenser goes about looking for the missing woman a second narration, between chapters, tells us what is happening to the missing woman. At first I didn't like this technique. It felt like an interruption to me. But I got used to it. Spenser's search for clues takes him from Boston to Maine to California and back. Spenser thinks Quirk's wife may be in a hispanic enclave of a Boston suburb. In Los Angeles he gets a Spanish speaking Californian gangster to help him navigate the Massachusetts hispanic ghetto. Hawk, Spenser's usual companion, is not in Thin Air. Some surprises and some violence of course.

When I find living authors I like while reading their books in order I hope to catch up to their currents works. Robert B. Parker died in 2010. When I reach the end of his Spenser novels it will be sad that there are no more. I know other authors have continued writing stories with Parker's characters but it is not the same. I've glanced at a few on the non-Parker books. None of these authors can do dialog as well as Parker did. ( )

Only made it through chapter 6; just not my cup of tea, mostly for the cussin' language.
That ruins a reading experience for me, even if it is "authentic."
I was not brought up in a family or community that used the now commonly-heard epithets in front of children.

Also, the premise of the story (chasing a kidnapper whose identity the reader already knows) is not a subgenre I'm partial to.

YMMV ( )