Hugger Mugger (Spenser) (Paperback)

~ (Author) "I WAS At my desk, in my office, with my feet up on the windowsill, and a yellow pad in my lap, thinking about baseball..." (more)
Key Phrases: horse shooter, stable pony, horse shooting, Security South, Hugger Mugger, Walter Clive (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Why is somebody shooting Walter Clive's horses at Three Fillies Stables in Lamarr, Georgia? That's what toothy, patrician Walter wants the droll, hulking Boston detective Spenser to find out. Walter worries that his racetrack phenomenon Hugger Mugger, worth millions, is next. So Spenser goes south to a place where "the heat felt like it could be cut into squares and used to build a wall," as he puts it in the crisp Chandleresque lingo that made him famous in dozens of novels.

The Clive clan is one weird bunch. Take Walter's daughters, his three "fillies." Penny is like her dad, all impeccable looks and icy efficiency. Stonie and SueSue take after their sinister mom, who left the family to live with a guitarist in San Francisco and changed her name to Sherry Lark. Penny helps Dad run the business, while her soused sisters cheat on their pathetic husbands, Cord and Pud. (Pud's short for Puddle; his dad was named Poole.) As unsightly family secrets spill, Spenser feels like he's in a Tennessee Williams play. Then someone on two legs takes a bullet, and the mystery gets tense. Spenser gets plenty of sarcastic mileage out of upper-class horse-country twits, crooked security guards, dumb jocks gone to seed, and wily Southern lawyers, and the story saunters well. What's best are the endless wisecracks, the unflattering thumbnail character sketches, and sharp sentences like this one: "Like all jockeys, he was about the size of a ham sandwich, except for his hands, which appeared to be those of a stonemason." --Tim Appelo --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

Despite frequent appearances by Susan Silverman (longtime love of Boston PI Spenser) and the absence of Hawk (his enigmatic sidekick), the latest entry in Parker's estimable series is a worthy one. Missing is the sap that can stickie-up scenes between Spenser and Susan, and in Hawk's place strides a new sidekick, Tedy Sapp, who's gay and as tough as they come. Tedy's only a temp replacement, though, because the reason he's here and Hawk's not is that most of the action takes place in rural Georgia, where Tedy owns a gay bar. Spenser travels there on his own temp job--to find out who's been shooting horses at Three Fillies Stables, owned by Walter Clive, the most powerful man in the county, and to keep that someone from shooting Clive's prize thoroughbred, Hugger Mugger. Spenser roots through the highly dysfunctional family of Clive's three daughters and their husbands (one a pedophile, one a drunk), annoys Clive's security men and befriends both Tedy and the local sheriff, with whom the PI discusses doughnuts. When Clive is shot dead, Spenser is fired by the alpha daughter, only to be rehired by Clive's mistress, who believes there's more to the mayhem than horseplay. This novel offers more traditional mystery elements than many Spenser tales, although most readers will finger the prime villain way before Spenser does. The pacing is strong, the characters are fresh as dew and the prose is Parker-perfect. The Spenser-specific personal drama that drives the best of the tales is lacking, but overall, the story will fit Parker fans like an old shoe. (Apr.) FYI: Parker's most recent novel, Family Honor, will be filmed starring Helen Hunt.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: Berkley; 1st THUS edition (June 12, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0425179559
• ISBN-13: 978-0425179550
• Product Dimensions: 6.7 x 4.1 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (95 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #67,615 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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• This is item 28 in The Spenser Series.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

27 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars If Robert B. Parker wrote a Dick Francis mystery..., April 3, 2000

By	John DiBello (Brooklyn, NY) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Hugger Mugger : A Spenser Novel (Hardcover)

Who else but Robert Parker could tackle three different mystery characters in three different novels a year and still be one of the most consistently entertaining writers in the mystery field? But (with apologies to Jesse Stone and Helen H...er, sorry, Sunny Randall), it's Spenser we love the best. My two favorite mystery novelists are Robert B. Parker and Dick Francis, and this mystery, set in Georgia horse country, is the best of both worlds: Spenser must track down the murderer of horses at a training farm, populated by (as Spenser says) the cast of a Tennessee Williams play. As always, much of the fun is the dialogue--no one's better than Spenser taking the wind out of a pompous twit's sails, and no one's better at writing that wise-guy with an intellectual edge than Parker. Any complaints? Well, sure, there's a big one. No Hawk! Luckily, Susan's around, and so is Pearl the Wonder Dog. Spenser's sidekick in this book, a gay ex-cop named Tedy Sapp, is interesting enough, but Mr. Sapp, you're *no* Hawk! (But who is?) My other quibble is a broader one. This is a fine standard Spenser mystery, but it's nothing more than that--Spenser gets a client, scouts the case, matches wits with the suspects, flirts a bit (but stays loyal to Susan, of course) and cracks the solution. But a truly exceptional Spenser book, while it contains all these elements, can be so much more. I've been reading Spenser's adventures for nearly 20 years, and the ones that make the most impression on me--those I consider the best, in which Parker transcends the normal mystery novel--are the books in which Spenser as a character moves forward dramatically, in which something major happens to Spenser *personally* to change or influence his life. Don't get me wrong--that kind of approach would not be welcome in every book...but after nearly 30 Spenser books the ones that stand out in my mind are "Early Autumn"..."A Catskill Eagle"..."Small Vices"...Spenser adventures that bring us more into the personal life of Parker's hero than the others. That Parker is capable of such sublime heights between the more-standard Spenser (and Jesse Stone and Sunny Randall) mysteries is the most important reason I keep reading him.

19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Better Than Some, Not the Best, Though, April 6, 2000

By	Michael Weber "fairportfan" (Atlanta) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Hugger Mugger : A Spenser Novel (Hardcover)

This is an interesting departure for Spenser -- Parker has apparently decided to see if he can still get a handle on the character without the "furniture" that has accumulated in the series over the years.

Thus, Hawk is nowhere to be seen, Vinnie Morris and Martin Quirk are voices on telephones doing favours for Spenser, and Spenser isn't even in Boston.

Beyond that, Parker rings variations on some of his own cliches -- the thuggish character whom Spenser has to humiliate turns out to be one of the Good Guys in the end, the local Top Cop not only likes Spenser, he's ahppy to have him stirring up trouble on the local scene that, for political reasons, the local law can't get into... and other somewhat off-center takes.

Parker has either visited Atlanta recently or done his research well -- when Spenser comes to Atlanta from (fictitious) Lamarr, he speaks of the local geography and business with a quiet assurance -- and accuracy.

Another departure for Spenser is the ending -- about which all i can say is just that -- that it's not a usual-type Spenser ending. I'll even go so far as to say that some readers (of whom i'm not one) may feel that he really hjasn't completed the story. But he has -- the solution is complete and elegant in Spenser's head, and he knows the guilty will sooner or later suffer...

One odd element in this book is that a completely-unrelated short story (set in Boston), with unrelated characters, is spliced into the middle of the book.

Parker has Susan refer to the events in this short story in a rather forced-sounding attempt to make it fit in by having her explain something about the main story by referring to the events of the interlude... But it really doesn't work.

OTOH, it's a neat little vignette of Spenser at work, deciding where justice lies and then going ahead and facilitating Justice with little regard for law, legality or the feelings of his client.

One minor gripe -- As in "Paper Doll" (set in an equally fictitious South Carolina county that Spenser briefly visits again in "Hugger Mugger"), Parker has missed a minor piece of Southrun talk -- we don't, generally, refer to Interstate highways as, say, "Route 20" -- such a reference is usually reserved for some piddly little State Highway; two-lane blacktop winding thru god-knows-where in the less-populated end of the county.

Don't know why that bothers me, except it's so obvious, as if Spenser were in Louisiana and referred to the "County Jail"...

Highly recommended, despite my personal dialog twitches.

21 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of Parker's Best Spenser novels!, April 14, 2000

By A Customer

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This review is from: Hugger Mugger : A Spenser Novel (Hardcover)

This is Parker's best Speser novel in recent years. Over time the character and his relationship with Susan Silverman and Hawk has grown quite matter of fact. Lost was the essence of the main character that was in the earlier books. I can only guess but I think Parker has had a good strategy the last few years. He wrote a couple of novels with a different male character (vasty different from Spenser) and one with a female character (but much like Spenser). Returning in Hugger Mugger, parker takes Spenser out of all the "normal" settings - away from Boston, away from Hawk (no "jive-talk" bantering)and leaves Susan Silverman and Pearl the Wonderdog as supporting characters.

By doing this the author has forced himself to concentrate on Spenser - the character and by doing that has succeeded in bringing back the "something" that makes this character work.

The plot itself is quite good, but the character (and the supporting "cast") is what makes this work. My only complaint (minor) is how it ended -I felt there was a "wrap up" chapter missing, but all in all a great mystery and a fabulously great Spenser novel!