Painted Ladies

Its place in Spenser

Painted Ladies is book 39 in the Spenser series. It follows The Professional. It is followed by Sixkill. See the full Spenser reading order.

Spenser is a Boston private investigator -- ex-boxer, Korean War veteran, gourmet cook, wisecracking romantic -- whose one-name toughness (never explained beyond a nod to the Elizabethan poet) masks a code of honor as rigid as any knight's. Robert B. Parker launched the series in 1973 with The Godwulf Manuscript and spent nearly four decades refining a template that became the genre standard: terse, dialogue-driven prose, a hero who talks his way through trouble as often as he fights his way out, and a real…