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Walking Shadow is one of those ho-hum Spensers. It’s a page-turner—all the Spensers are page-turners—but the reader is not left with a lot of pleasure after all that page-turning is done.

Still, there’s a lot going on: a stalker dressed in black, a busty—and needy�� young actress, the sexy wife of a Chinese gangster, a once-good police chief mired in corruption, a Vietnamese gang (“The Double Dragons��), a tong lord, both Hawk and Vinnie Morris for backup, human trafficking in the dead of night, a kidnapping on videotape, and an actor shot dead on stage just after singing “what else matters if you"re lucky in love?��

Perhaps that’s the trouble: there’s just too much going on. It’s as if Parker just threw a lot of stuff into his top hat, and out popped this story. And the biggest problem is that the solution to to the murders seems just as arbitrary as anything else.

The atmosphere of Port City, particularly the boat landing at midnight, are both very fine, as is Spenser’s interview with an illegal fish plant worker in his tiny rented room. But these bright spots are not enough to make a good book.

It is Spenser, course. And this series is always entertaining. But if—unlike me—you haven’t resolved to read the whole series, you could easily find a better Spenser mystery.