A knock on Spenser's office door can only mean one thing: a
new case. This time the visitor is a local lawyer with an
interesting story. Elizabeth Shaw specializes in wills and
trusts at the Boston law firm of Shaw & Cartwright, and
over the years she's developed a friendship with wives of
very wealthy men. However, these rich wives have a mutual
secret: they've all had an affair with a man named Gary
Eisenhower- and now he's blackmailing them for money. Shaw
hires Spenser to make Eisenhower "cease and desist," so to
speak, but when women start turning up dead, Spenser's
assignment goes from blackmail to murder.
As matters become more complicated, Spenser's longtime
love, Susan, begins offering some input by analyzing
Eisenhower's behavior patterns in hopes of opening up a new
avenue of investigation. It seems that not all of Gary's
women are rich. So if he's not using them for blackmail,
then what is his purpose? Spenser switches tactics to focus
on the husbands, only to find that innocence and guilt may
be two sides of the same coin.
With its eloquently spare prose and some of the best
supporting characters to grace the printed page, The
Professional is further proof that "[t]here's hardly an
author in the crime novel business like Parker" (Pittsburgh
Post-Gazette).
