Book Review – Sudden Mischief

Sudden Mischief (1998)
by Robert B. Parker

Number 25 in the series, Sudden Mischief has a couple of interesting divergences from the typical Spenser novel. It doesn’t stray too widely from the typical genre, but I like how he took the interaction between Spenser and his love interest, Susan, in a different direction.

Susan, Spenser’s long time love interest, is contacted by her ex-husband. He needs her help. She turns to Spenser for that help, and sets the ball rolling for a series of events that lead to embezzlement, murder, and money laundering.

The ex-husband likes to live life large, but he seems to live beyond his means. When the husband talked to Susan, it sounded to her that he was at the end of his rope. But when Spenser talks to him, he says Susan is making a mountain out of a molehill. Spenser thinks about leaving it at that and walking away for about a half a second. But he has promised Susan, and he also smells a mystery that he wants to solve.

The interaction between Spenser and Susan was well written. Susan is a psychologist, so she should probably know better, but she’s a bit messed up by her ex. She wants Spenser to fill her in regarding his investigations, but simultaneously doesn’t want to talk about it. She gets flustered and angry. Parker writes this part well, particularly since the character of Susan can sometimes be pretty one-dimensional. Especially in this middle era, she is simply there for sex, though admittedly monogamous, committed sex. The best books are when Susan uses her psychology to help Spenser. In this novel that role is subverted, as she has complicated feelings about her ex, her current beau, and all that that entails.

In the end, the ex-husband was found to be embezzling from charities and laundering money for the mob, which kind of means he was embezzling from the mob, too. He also quite probably murdered a man. There is a final showdown in which Spenser proves to the ex-husband in front of Susan that he has evidence to put him away. The ex-husband never admits to anything, and runs away. It felt like real people, mostly. There was no convenient point where the bad guy confesses to the police. Spenser just has the evidence, which he turns over to the cops.

Sudden Mischief had good plotting, good interaction, well-written dialogue, and there was relatively little of the braggadocio that is a hallmark of later Spenser. It’s probably my favorite of the 90’s era so far.