"Spenser, we're improvising here. When you do that, a lot can go wrong in a hurry. The whole thing can turn to shit pretty quick. Do you understand?"
Healy sighed. "He understands, Goldberg. You pretty much just described his entire career." ( )

Flat, as the later ones all were - and it doesn't help knowing this one was unfinished... But the worst Spenser I ever read was wonderful. ( )

A few days before Christmas, Boston P.I. Spenser is visited by a young boy named Slide who begs
Spenser to help his friend Jackie. Jackie Alvarez runs "Street Business", a homeless shelter for young boys where they are fed, housed and helped to find jobs. Someone wants "Street Business" out of business and a few of the kids have been roughed up and robbed. Spenser meets with Jackie, and although Spenser knows Street Business is not a legal endeavor, he admires Jackie's resolve to help the children. Jackie's older brother Juan is a wealthy businessman in Boston and helps fund the project although he doesn't approve. While investigating the threats to Jackie, Spenser learns quite about about Juan and his possible illegal commerce. After both Slide and Jackie are severely beaten, Spenser and Hawk decide it's time to delve a little deeper into Juan Alvarez.

This was a very short, easy to read Spenser novel. Too much happened in this small book for anything to be explained well so it felt very rushed and frenetic. This was published posthumously after Parker's death and, although he had begun the novel, it was finished by Helen Brann. ( )

Subtitled, "A Spenser Holiday Novel", this is the book Parker was working on when he died at his desk in 2010. It was finished by his long-time agent, and literary executor, Helen Brann. It's a short and simple story in which Spenser responds to the plea of Slide, an 11-year-old street urchin, to protect the man who has given him and a number of other homeless kids a safe place to be, outside the system. Naturally, there's more to this than first appears, and Spenser soon finds himself with a potential conflict of interest when another would-be client asks him to get her out of a relationship with a wealthy and dangerous man, who happens to be the brother and financial support of Slide's benefactor. Meanwhile, Christmas is approaching, and Spenser has decided to tackle the preparation of a turducken...if you love Spenser (and Hawk) you know you HAVE to read this. ( )

As she says in the Author's Note at the end of the book, Helen Brann, Parker's longtime literary agent and friend, finished the Christmas Spenser novel that Parker had been working on the morning he died. Unlike some other books finished by someone who didn't start them, this felt seamless and very Parkeresque.

Almost all the familiar characters are here: Susan Silverman, Hawk, Healy, Martin Quirk, Vinnie, Paul (via phone messages). Relatively few people die and some even live happily ever after. There is a rich and powerful man who may not be a good person in love with a woman who is beginning to have doubts about their relationship---rather like Susan in some other stories, although no parallels are made. ( )