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Thin Air

Thin Air

CrimeHardboiled
Published
1996
Language
English

Synopsis

A professional hitman is hired to eliminate a woman and ends up protecting her instead, and the plot is driven by a tense, morally ambiguous contract-gone-wrong scenario rather of a mystery or a romance. The tone is gritty and tense throughout, with a hardboiled edge typical of Parker's Spenser novels, and the violence is depicted realistically rather than for spectacle. No romance or romance-adjacent tropes apply — the relationship between the hitman and the woman is one of reluctant protection, not a courtship. No heist, survival, or found-family tropes fit the plot structure.

Prose complexity
4/10

Vibe

DarkTense

Genres

Crime Hardboiled

About the author

R
Robert B. Parker

Robert B. Parker (1932–2010) was an American crime novelist best known for creating Spenser, the wisecracking Boston private investigator at the center of 40 novels beginning with The Godwulf Manuscript (1974). He also created the Jesse Stone and Sunny Randall detective series and, starting with Appaloosa, a series of Westerns featuring Virgil Cole and Everett Hitch. He served in the US Army in Korea and earned a PhD in English from Boston University, and in 2002 the Mystery Writers of America n...

Characters

SpenserProtagonist
All characters in Thin Air