This past May, Sixkill by Robert B. Parker arrived in bookstores. It’s the thirty-ninth book in Parker’s Spenser detective series and I’ve read each of the previous thirty-eight at least a half dozen times. The day it arrived I hauled my ass down to the local Barnes and Noble and bought a copy. Which was an odd experience since these days I buy books almost exclusively for my iPad, and before that it was my Kindle. Flash forward six months and that copy of Sixkill still sits pristine and unopened on my nightstand. Why? Because Parker, dubbed “The Dean of American Crime Fiction”, died last year and Sixkill is his last. Between 1973 and 2011, Parker published nearly 70 books and almost all of them were bestsellers. He’s most well known his Spenser series, featuring the wise-cracking, street-smart Boston private-eye, which earned him a devoted following and reams of critical acclaim. (It’s worth clarifying that these excellent mysteries were the inspiration for the dreadful and unwatchable show Spenser: For Hire which eschewed the gritty character and ambiguity of situation that make the books so compelling for the cloying tidiness network television demands.) I’ve been a mystery fan since I was given a set of Encyclopedia Brown books for my eighth birthday. A voracious reader, I quickly finished those, then burned through all of the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew in no time at all. Since this was before there was a robust Young Adult market, I leapt into the grown up stuff, and quickly fell under the spell of mystery and noir. Carroll John Daly, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Mickey Spillane. I’d read them all by the time I became a teenager. And then, I found Spenser. I grew up in a safe middle class...