But the repartee along the way is better than in other recent Spensers there's a blessed minimum of the sleuth's cooking and preening and Parker's TV-series experience shows nicely in the irreverent detailing of on-location production and show-biz dealings.Īnother sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.Ī week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. The windup's a disappointment here-especially when it leads to another one of Spenser's saintly excursions into the psychological rehabilitation of a damaged soul.

But only after another death and Jill's disappearance does the truth emerge-in a melodramatic showdown with a trendy, psychosexual twist. Then, leaving sidekick Hawk to watch over Jill, Spenser flies to California to interview the star's alcoholic mother and dried-up father (long-estranged from each other and from Jill) he also uncovers the secret illegitimate child in her past. He quizzes some of the men she's dumped: a mob-connected tycoon a pathetic ex-husband living in grimy anonymity in western Massachusetts (the book's best vignette).

Is someone out to get sexy, boozy, fragile Jill Joyce, star of Fifty Minutes? Or is she just a nuts-o prima donna? Spenser takes Jill fairly seriously-especially after her stunt-double is murdered (by mistake?). Spenser of Boston in another TV-episode-sized, awfully familiar scenario: this time he's hired to guard the temperamental star of a TV series (shooting on location in Boston) and to find how who, if anyone, has been terrorizing her with nasty phone calls and such.

Stardust robert parker