When the bride of a Boston police detective vanishes, he hires Spenser to find her. His path leads from a New England college campus to glamorous L.A. Sports clubs. When the trail turns to a world of prostitution, drug abuse, and self-destruction, Spenser must enter ghetto tenements to continue his search. Ultimately, Spenser must hire a Chicago hitman to help him free the girl from a sociopathic ex lover. Working through gang leaders and corrupt

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Everybody loves a winner, and the Rabbs are major league. Marty is the Red Sox star pitcher, Linda the loving wife. She loves everyone except the blackmailer out to wreck her life. Is Marty throwing fast balls or throwing games? It doesn't take long for Spenser to link Marty's performance with Linda's past...or to find himself trapped between a crazed racketeer and an enforcer toting an M-16. America's favorite pastime has suddenly become a very...

Rachel wallace is a lesbian feminist. The publication of her newest book brings death threats, and her publisher hires Spenser to protect her on the book tour. She is as tough and proud as he is and their clash of styles is inevitable. They argue; she fires him and, unprotected, is kidnapped. Spenser, looking for Rachel Wallace, encounters the publishing establishment, television talk shows, the Ku Klax Klan, the ultra right, and the great snow...

TV reporter Candy Sloan has eyes the color of cornflowers and legs that stretch all the way to heaven. She also has somebody threatening to rearrange her lovely face if she keeps on snooping into charges of Hollywood racketeering. Spenser's job is to keep Candy healthy until she breaks the biggest story of her career. But her star witness has just bowed out with three bullets in his chest, two tough guys have doubled up to test Spenser's skill with...

Spenser is good at finding things. But this time he has a client out on Cape Cod who is in over his head. Harvey Shepard has lost his pretty wife -- and a very pretty quarter million bucks in real estate. Now a loan shark is putting on the bite. Spenser finds himself doing a slow burn in the Cape Cod sun. The wife has turned up as a hot suspect in a case of murder one...the in-hock hubby has 24 hours before the mob makes him dead...and suddenly Spenser...

The most dangerous man to cross is one who isn't afraid to die. But the most deadly is one who doesn't want to live. And Spenser has just lost the woman who made life his #1 priority. So when a religious sect kidnaps a pretty young dancer, no death threat can make Spenser cut and run. Now a hit man's bullet is wearing Spenser's name. But Boston's big boys don't know Spenser's ready and willing to meet death more than halfway.

Nice girls don't. But blond, beautiful April Kyle does. She's a hooker hooked on the wrong guy -- and she's on her way to trouble. So is Spenser. Looking out for April has landed him in the crud of Times Square. It's not a long way to big-business boardrooms where blood money get laundered into long green, sex is a commodity, and young girls are the currency. "Spenser's back and New York's got him...proficient with his gun and fists, not to mention...

In this crime story, the Boston private eye Spenser is hired to determine whether a reporter was killed by dope dealers or by an irate husband.

Spenser smells corruption in a college town. Taft University's hottest basketball star is shaving points for quick cash. All manner of sleaze -- from corrupt academics to hoods with graduate degrees -- have their fingers in the pot. Spenser's search takes him from lecture halls to blue collar bars and finally into a bloody confrontation with almost certain death. But Spenser saves an arrogant young athlete -- even though it nearly kills him to do...

When a teenage girl and her baby are gunned down by feuding street gangs, tenants of a Boston housing project hire Hawk and Spenser to protect them and bring the killers to justice.