When Connie Kelly tells her therapist, Dr. Susan Silverman, about having been conned, Silverman points her client toward Boston PI Spenser (and, of course, Susan's longtime partner). The problem is M. Brooks Welles, who portrayed himself as an intelligence expert with experience in the CIA and various other alphabet-soup agencies. When he pitches Connie on investing money in a quasimilitary resort in which real and wannabe tough guys would come for training, Connie goes for it. (No wonder she needs a therapist.) Spenser finds Welles (after another investor in the scheme turns up dead) but is forced to back away when Connie decides she loves the con artist after all and moves to Georgia with him. That goes bad, of course, and Spenser and longtime running buddy Hawk head to the Peach State to administer some justice. Standing in their way are an evangelical megachurch and a paramilitary outfit with an affiliation to it. Atkins has really hit his stride as steward for Parker's characters. This installment should please both Parker loyalists and those new to the series.--Lukowsky, Wes Copyright 2017 Booklist

A damsel in distress enlists Boston's most storied private eye in her cause and then has second and third thoughts.M. Brooks Welles, if that's his real name, seemed so wonderful. He was a good bit older than Jumpstart administrator Connie Kelly, but that was no problem: Dr. Susan Silverman tells Spenser that Connie's always been attracted to older men, and Connie confesses it was a rush to be seen with an anti-terrorist pundit who was constantly invited onto talk shows. Now that Welles has stolen her heart and $300,000, though, she wants him to pay. It doesn't take long for Spenser to track down Johnny Gredoni, the gun shop owner who was Welles' partner in a land deal that went south, taking Connie's money with it, or much longer to find out that virtually everything Welles told Connie, from his background at Harvard to the CIA, is a bill of goods. But the ironclad contract Welles had Connie sign would make it nearly impossible for her to sue him even if Spenser could find him. Then, incredibly, Spenser does find him, and it does no good. Welles simply smirks his way back into Connie's good graces, and she tearfully tells Spenser that his services are no longer required. Spenser goes back to the apartment in the Charlestown Navy Yard he's called home ever since his old place was torched (Robert B. Parker's Slow Burn, 2016, etc.), cashes Connie's check, and tells himself the case is over. Wrong. Act 2 will send Spenser and Hawk to Welles' old stamping ground, the Greater Faith Ministries of Georgia, for a tussle with gun-running pastors that floats so wildly free of Spenser's initial investigation that it might have been written by yet another Robert B. Parker wannabe. Readers taken in by Atkins' sureness of touch in the first half of this schizoid yarn richly deserve to get flimflammed by the bait-and-switch that follows. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

A taut, suspenseful story line drives Edgar-finalist Atkins's sixth Spenser novel (after 2016's Slow Burn), which deepens the relationship between the Boston PI and his significant other, therapist Susan Silverman. Susan refers patient Connie Kelly to Spenser after learning that Connie was victimized by a con man calling himself M. Brook Welles. A popular cable news talking head on national security issues, he told her he worked for the CIA. While professing his undying love for Connie, Welles scammed her out of almost $300,000 in a bogus real estate deal. Spenser quickly ascertains that most of what Welles has presented as his biography, including a Harvard education, is fabricated. After following the trail to a shady gun dealer, the detective finds it necessary to enlist his deadly sidekick, Hawk, to help track down the truth. Some interesting tension arises because Susan feels responsible for Spenser's involvement in the increasingly perilous case, while her professional ethics constrain her from giving him important information. Agent: Esther Newberg, ICM. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.