Someone to Watch Over Me by Ace Atkins

Published by G.P. Putnam's Sons on January 12, 2021

Ace Atkins is the best writer in the Robert B. Parker factory. He’s tasked with churning out the Spenser novels. Parker has been dead for ten years and probably does little writing these days. You wouldn’t know of his death from the book cover, which places Atkins’ name in a much smaller font than Parker’s. Technically, the book’s title is Robert B. Parker’s Someone to Watch Over Me but it should be The Estate of Robert B. Parker’s Someone to Watch Over Me.

I imagine there is a blurb somewhere that says the novel is “torn from the headlines.” Don’t you hate that phrase? The villain is Jeffrey Epstein, except his name in the book is Peter Steiner. The girlfriend who is now facing trial for supplying underage girls to Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, is Poppy Palmer in the book.

Steiner befriends politicians and wealthy men, bringing them to his island in the Bahamas where underage girls can give them massages. Sorting out facts from salacious gossip and smear campaigns (no, John Roberts didn’t visit Epstein’s island) is proving to be difficult in the real world. Fortunately, Atkins stays away from the celebrity sideshow. Alan Dershowitz doesn’t even make a cameo and that guy is everywhere.

Mattie Sullivan is Parker’s “occasional secretary, part-time assistant, and sleuthing apprentice.” She learns about an underage girl who was paid a few hundred dollars to massage a man in an exclusive Boston club. The man dropped his trousers and the girl fled at the sight of his trouser snake, leaving her laptop behind. Spenser offers to help Mattie recover the laptop from the club and, in the process, learns that the man — who turns out to be Peter Steiner — has done similar things or worse with a number of minor females. Mattie makes it her mission to track down other victims (and a lawyer to help them) while Parker makes it his mission to help her whenever things might get dangerous. Inevitably, that happens regularly.

Much of the book explores familiar territory. Spenser hangs out with girlfriend Susan and dog Pearl (the third dog to which he’s given that name). Spenser exchanges witty repartee with his buddy Hawk when they aren’t busy killing people. Spenser also has a run-in with a past nemesis called the Gray Man, which seems to be a popular character name in thrillerworld.

Like a lot of “torn from the headlines” novels, this one just isn’t very interesting. Fiction can be more illuminating than fact, but when a novel hews closely to known events, it tends to sacrifice illumination for titillation. The novel has Spenser chasing Steiner and his thugs around Boston and Miami until its inevitable conclusion in the Bahamas. The outcome is predictable and the story offers too little suspense to sustain interest. Bringing Epstein to justice is much too easy, thanks in part to an implausible, out-of-the-blue twist at the end.

Still, Atkins is a craftsman. He knows how to move a plot along and, for what it’s worth, he has captured the tone of Parker’s Spenser novels (I always enjoyed Spenser for the Boston atmosphere more than the stories). Atkins’ own fiction reveals the depth of his characterization, but Spenser was never a deep guy and Atkins is constrained by the character he inherited. While Someone to Watch Over Me might be a good read for Spenser completists, I’d refer readers to Atkins’ Quinn Colson series for better plots and deeper characters.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS