God Save the Child [Paperback]

New York Times bestselling author of the Spenser series of crime thrillers - Book 2 in the series -

Appie Knoll is the kind of suburb where kids grow up right. But something is wrong. Fourteen-year-old Kevin Bartlett disappears. Everyone thinks he's run away -- until the comic strip ransom note arrives.  It doesn't take Spenser long to get the picture -- an affluent family seething with rage, a desperate boy making strange friends...friends like Vic Harroway, body builder. Mr. Muscle is Spenser's only lead and he isn't talking...except with his fists. But when push comes to shove, when a boy's life is on the line, Spenser can speak that language too.

A brillant, and cynical, comic tragedy or tragic comedy of manners. Long may Parker wave. -- Los Angeles TimesRobert B. Parker was the author of seventy books, including the legendary Spenser detective series, novels featuring Chief Jesse Stone, and the acclaimed Virgil Cole/Everett Hitch westerns, as well as the Sunny Randall novels. Winner of the Mystery Writers of America Grand Master Award and long considered the undisputed dean of American crime fiction, Parker died in January 2010.1
 
If you leaned way back in the chair and cranked your neck hard over, you could see the sky from my office window, delft-blue and cloudless and so bright it looked solid. It was September after Labor Day, and somewhere the corn was probably as high as an elephant’s eye, the kind of weather when a wino could sleep warm in a doorway.
 
“Mr. Spenser, are you listening to us?”
 
I straightened my head up and looked back at Roger and Margery Bartlett.
 
“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “You were just saying about how you never dealt with a private detective before, but this was an elC$