The Widening Gyre [Paperback]

The adoring wife of a senatorial candidate has a smile as sweet as candy and dots her i's with little hearts. A blond beauty, she is the perfect mate for an ambitious politician, but she has a little problem with sex and drugs--a problem someone has managed to put on videotape.

The big boys figure a little blackmail will put her husband out of the race. Until Spenser hops on the candidate's bandwagon.

But getting back the tape of the lady's X-rated indiscretion is a nonstop express ride to trouble--trouble that is deep, wide and deadly.Robert B. Parkerwas 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.Chapter 1
I was nursing a bottle of Murphy’s Irish Whiskey, drinking it from the neck of the bottle sparingly, and looking down from the window of my office at Berkeley Street where it crosses Boylston.
 
It was dark and there wasn’t much traffic down there. Across the street there were people working late in the ad agency, but the office where the brunette art director worked was dark. The silence in my office was linear and dwindling, like an art-perspective exercise. The building was pretty much empty for the night and the occasional faraway drone and jolt of the elevator only added energy to the silence.
 
I sipped a little whiskey.
 
When you thought about it, silence was rarely silent. Silence was the small noises you heard when the larger noises disappeared.
 
I sipped another small swallow of whiskey. The whiskey added a little charge to the silence. Irish whiskey was in fact excellent for thinking about things like silence.
 
A car came slowly down Berkeley StrlÓQ