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| Chance (Spenser) | 
 enlarge | Author: Robert B. Parker
Publisher: Berkley
Category: Book
List Price: $7.99
Buy Used: $0.01
You Save: $7.98 (100%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  27 reviews
Sales Rank: 63860
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 336
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 6.7 x 4.1 x 1
ISBN: 0425157474
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780425157473
ASIN: 0425157474
Publication Date: April 1, 1997
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More.
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Product Description
Spenser and Hawk investigate the disappearance of Anthony Meeker, the husband of mafia daughter Shirley Meeker, and begin to suspect that his wife, father-in-law, and associates miss him for darker purposes. Reprint.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 22 more reviews...
 Chance (Spenser) by Robert B. Parker November 2, 2008
Love Robert Parker Books. This book came in great shape.
Enjoy reading his book
Chance would be a fine thing . . . August 8, 2007
In this VERY amusing (although bloody) chapter in the Spenser library, Spenser and Hawk travel to Las Vegas to find Anthony Meeker, the husband of Shirley Meeker, the daughter of crime boss Julius Ventura. No one admits to knowing why he ran - according to Shirley he worshiped the ground she walked on - and Ventura is not keen to have Spenser digging around trying to find out why Anthony ran, he just wants Spenser to find Anthony. When Spenser says that to find Anthony he might have to discover why he ran, Ventura backs down with ill grace and warns that anything learned better not be blabbed.
The trouble with Anthony, as it turns out, is that he gambles a lot and loses consistently. Badly. All the time. And Vegas is no exception.
This was a very entertaining chapter in the Spenser series - kept my mind off the fact I been stuck in the hospital, anyway! Don't miss it!
 Spenser series flagging March 1, 2007
I first became aware of the Spenser (detective) character from the TV show Spenser for Hire (1985-1988.)
The series was adapted from Robert Parker's, Spenser novels. It was the Hawk character - brilliantly brought to life by Avery Brooks that I liked best.
I soon started reading the novels - and have read most of them.
To sum up the Spenser character - He is a middle aged, Boston,detective with good street credit. The cops and the hoodlums respect him. He is not trying to save the world - just make a small difference.
Parker has been prospering from the Spenser series for more than 20 years - a nice meal ticket.
Lately I have noticed the dialogue becoming predictable - dare I say boring. The plot lines are less imaginative and the final chapters try to sum up a story where clues have been sparse.
Chance is an exercise in trying to ring the Spenser series register just a few more times.
In this adventure our heroes travel to Las Vegas to investigate the disappearance of a mob figure (Julius Ventura)'s son in law (Anthony Meeker.)
The supportive cast includes a brutal mob enforcer - Marty Anaheim and his battered wife Bibi, Julius Ventura's emotionally challenged daughter, a double dealing Las Vegas gumshoe and a host of unpleasant underworld figures.
Only Bibi is marginally fleshed but comes off as a lack luster stereotype.
When the mystery is finally resolved - you will find yourself caring - not at all.
The best Spenser novels rely on fast action and witty dialogue.
Chance's action is not fast and the dialogue is labored and time worn.
The characters that we have to come to love so well (Spenser, Hawk and Susan Silverman) have not evolved. They have no hobbies, they ignore advances in electronic technology, have no problems with their plumbing, and never comment on current Boston's politics.
If you are new to the Spenser series - spend your money and time on the earlier novels - you won't be disappointed.
Robert Parker is an elegant, witty writer who is exploring new territory.
As the Spenser series has declined - Parker introduced two new leading characters that now have their own series; Jesse Stone and Sunny Randall.
Both of the those new series are a lot of fun.
Is it possible that the next Spenser novel will be a phoenix? - I think the chances are unlikely.
"Hey, Robert Parker!" Prove me wrong!
Caslo
 Spencer Takes On Organized Crime September 19, 2006
Spencer and Hawk agree to take on a job for the daughter of a local Mafia kingpin. She wants them to find her husband who has gone missing. Seems simple enough, but things soon become complicated as they are wont to do in a Spencer novel. Hawk and Susan each have a significant role in this one and the snappy dialog, for which Parker is so well known, is here in abundance. The plot moves along at a good pace and then changes course about half way through the book and begins to wander quite a bit. Loose ends are tied up and questions finally answered at the conclusion. A fairly good read, but the second half was a bit of a struggle.
Casting Diamonds to Devils: Shattering A Child's Crystalline Dreams. July 7, 2006
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
The prologue of CHANCE was a haunting literary coup. Opening with the ethereal elegance of crystal goblets and white linen dreams, it descended quickly into the darkened schemes of beating bands and backed up screams:
>> It was all to come. The cocktails, the crystal, the starched white napkins, and the soft Sunday mornings with orange juice and floral print coverlets. Apple trees in spring blossom.... dense racket of the band and the crowd... booze and the sweet pungent marijuana smoke. <<
The scene appeared to be set-in-retro a few decades from the ongoing plot time, to a feel of the 70's:
Blackjack chewing gum, be-ribboned pony tails, dark loafers worn with no sox.
The effect reminded me of Sue Grafton's first chapter of "S is for Silence" with Violet portrayed in the 50's era, decades earlier than the 80's plot setting. (See my review on S, which I cut to 1/4 its original length to halt a blitzkrieg of No. Please ignore the bullet holes. Swiss Cheese is good.)
Later in the plot, Spenser made a few touching gestures, after the reader identified the red-haired woman in the 70's-retro, Cinderella prologue (with the antique-lace headed to the blinking-neon-light) and realized what befell the girlish schemes of a hopeful rescue from a brutal father.
During a lunch scene with the prologue gal (who easily received my sympathy), Spenser narrated:
I was quiet. She sat thinking back, looking past me at the lush artifice of the Las Vegas restaurant and probably not seeing it....
"You can't stop him. He'll find me and do what he's going to do and no one will stop him. Nobody can."
"I might stop him," I said.
A dialogue between Spenser and Hawk:
"She hasn't hired us. But I sort of told her I wouldn't let ... get her."
"Sure you did," Hawk said. "She's probably good looking and sad and you do four or five back flips and say we gonna eat Marty's lunch for him, he comes near her."
"I didn't do that many back flips."
Later, a few clips here and there from a scene in an MGM Grand motel room:
While I waited I patted her knee. My father used to do that, give me a pat once in a while, without comment....
"You all right in this?"
"No," she said. "All I can do is sit here and wait for the men to do whatever they'll do. How all right is that?"....
"I patted (her) knee again and headed for the door."
In a sense, this novel seemed to be dealing with vulnerability, sensitivity, and the idealized life brutalized, as much as with gambling and the death of romantic compulsions.
>> I walked with Susan through the brief wedge of dry heat into the air-conditioned terminal.... Watching her I felt the little knot in my stomach that I always felt when I left her.... I still stood for a moment, looking at the last place I had seen her, being careful not to be routine, while I became the other guy again, the one I was without her. It took a couple of minutes. And then I was him. He wasn't a bad guy; in fact sometimes I thought he had strengths that the other guy didn't have. Certainly he wasn't worse. But he was no one I wanted to be all the time. I turned back and headed for Lester and the Lincoln. <<
Parker painted the ambiance artifice of Vegas, the varied moods of its sunlight's unrelenting lack of relief:
>> ... live pirate show where one ship sinks another in the Treasure Island Lagoon, while the mist machines on the perimeter cooled us down. The rest of the hotels on our part of the strip looked like big, ugly hotels, a fifth-grader's dream of luxury, and nighttime excess, shopworn in the unblinking Nevada sunlight. <<
Describing a dead woman:
>> ... her white body dimpled and pudgy in the comfortless sunlight ... It was late morning and the dry heat lay and flat over everything. <<
The above type of Vegas detail is contrasted cleanly to Boston's climate, "Hawk and I went out, adequately armed, at least by our standards, and walked along the waterfront through a raw wind blowing off the harbor."
I'm beginning to notice some of what the addictive appeal is for me with the Spenser series, in addition to the above type of poetic prose in which the First Person Narrator sketches setting into life. The appeal is that I've been nicely set up to look for Spenser's unique brand of quips, quotes, and answers which slip to the reader those "keys" (or clues) on "How to Win the Boxing Matches of Life" (without feeling you've slimed your soul).
I don't know if Spenser's style is a melancholy-blues song, or poetry gone crisp with edges of truth. Maybe Parker's voice is the synergy of both, surged to the level of An Icon within The Cultural Conversation. When I read any Spenser novel now, I expect diamonds to glisten among the garbage of the "way we were" the way we are, the ...
"What I am to be I am now becoming."
I don't recall who said that. I just remember that it was quoted by a Girl Scout leader from my long gone youth.
While I enjoy Hawk's references of Spenser being an Eagle Scout, I was never fond of what I learned in Girl Scout camp (other than the above quote), what with the rats keeping me awake chewing on my shoes beside my cot, the wake up calls in the frigid frost of dawn, the choice of either shivering or sweating my terror of mountain lions and bears. The horrifying, bone-marrow-tapping Cold of the Nights in the mountains and woods were the worst, with the campfire always glowing too hard, too late, too small, too far away from my nightmares.
Working the summer as an assistant cook at a Girl's Scout camp designed (horribly poorly; what a horrendous choice that was!) my transition from home to college, at the end of my high school reign, during which I was class president and Co-Valedictorian.
All for what?
What a maze we go through to get from youth to adult, a maze which never seems to truly end with the Brass Ring called Actualization, a maize in which spirit bruises reign and rain.
Who doesn't at times feel like a losing gambler in life.
Returning to the Life of Spenser and the dry-heat, Nevada ambiance in this plot...
I noticed a pause in the middle of the book, in which questions like the above moved mood to melancholy, as Spenser wallowed within an absolute lack of success of his mission; an inability to take satisfaction in his pay (which he gave away) at the end of The Day. When I realized the book was only half finished at that seemingly moot point, I wondered how Parker would heat the rhythm enough to make the second half feel more than an extended tack-on. I was surprised that while Spenser, Hawk, and Susan were moaning the emptiness of dead ends in the case at hand, I didn't feel those dreaded spaces of reader boredom which sometimes overwhelm (underwhelm?) me if characters endure depressing lulls of dissatisfaction.
What kept me away from ennui at that half-way plot point of "Is this all there is?"
Possibly what kept me involved in the story was that I knew Parker would leave clues I could use for "me"; I wanted those more than I wanted completion to Parker's clients' questions and needs. They were there. Both. All. But, they weren't etched in glowing script on Silver Plates. Diamonds buried in mud, they were. I had to dig. I did.
See my tiara? Not a princess in a fairytale, I'm The Queen of my Dreams. Wherever they are, my dreams are mine. Who can steal something I keep in my mind while dining on time?
Maybe the secret is to know what might be attainable with sweat and finesse, and what is likely pie in the sky to save for sleep.
Onward. To more culinary cozies carefully contrasted by Parker, Rand, Woods, McGarrity, Grafton, Myers, Workinger, O'Loughlin ... The list goes on.
Diamonds before devils, and angels have wings. These are a few of my favorite things.
Speaking somewhat of choirs of dashing devils and soprano angels, I enjoy seeing voices of reviewers develop on Amazon, the only venue I've discovered which allows, in a way encourages this development, with its relatively open gift of space for individual songs to strike a rhythm and tone. If you want to identify more clearly what they mean by a writer's voice this is a good place to study that. Click on any "See all my reviews" and read a few from the beginning of the list, a few from current posts. Maybe you'll hear a song growing, which is more than a style.
Amazon has its very own music of the spheres. (For clear-voice reviews on opera and mystery, see the list of my Amazon Friend, L.E. Cantrell.)
Parker's dedication to his wife, Joan: "Every town is Paris; every month is May."
Linda G. Shelnutt
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