a young woman is found dead in a Hollywood star’s Boston hotel room. Looks like murder, smells like murder, but something doesn’t sit right with police captain Quirk — he prefers surety, so he asks Spenser to nose around. The star, Jumbo Nelson, a self-absorbed pig, rubs everyone the wrong way but insists he didn’t kill her. Jumbo’s bodyguard, a Cree Indian named Zebulon Sixkill, first gets thumped by Spenser and then adopted by him like a big puppy. Spenser helps him turn his life around and gets a new temporary sidekick — it’s a group that has grown steadily over the years. Spenser can at any time summon a dozen men in his same mold. All are men of honor, highly skilled, and share a largely unspoken code that allows the good and the bad and the ugly to play well together. If Parker had lived, no doubt Zebulon would have resurfaced in a subsequent book