Bye Bye Baby by Ace Atkins

Bye Bye Baby by Ace Atkins
Publisher: G. P. Putman’s Sons
Genre: Contemporary, Mystery/Suspense/Thriller
Rating: 4 stars
Reviewed by Fern

Carolina Garcia-Ramirez is a rising star in national politics, taking on the establishment with her progressive agenda. Tough, outspoken, and driven, the young congresswoman has ignited a new conversation in Boston about race, poverty, health care, and the environment. Now facing her second campaign, she finds herself not only fighting a tight primary with an old guard challenger but also contending with numerous death threats coming from hundreds of suspects.

When her chief of staff reaches out to Spenser for security and help finding the culprits of what he believes to be the most credible threats, Garcia-Ramirez is less than thrilled. Since her first grassroots run, she’s used to the antipathy and intimidation women of color often face when seeking power. To her, it’s all noise. But it turns out an FBI agent disagrees, warning Spenser that Garcia-Ramirez might be in real danger this time.

It doesn’t take long for Spenser to cross paths with an extremist group called The Minutemen, led by a wealthy Harvard grad named Bishop Graves. Although Graves is a social media sensation, pushing an agenda of white supremacy and toxic masculinity, he denies he’s behind the attacks. As the primary nears and threats become a deadly plot, it’s up to Spenser, Hawk, and a surprise trusted ally to ensure the congresswoman is safe. This is Spenser doing what he does best, living by a personal code and moral compass that can’t ever be broken.

Spenser is hired by political candidate Carolina Garcia-Ramirez’s team to keep her safe when some of her more colorful threatening letters appear to be getting out of hand. Bur Carolina isn’t keen for Spenser’s protection, and he quickly realizes that there are more than a few people who don’t want to see Carolina and her progressive views have any sort of success. Can Spenser keep up with everything being thrown at him?

Spenser is a long running series and while I feel some of the older style of this hard boiled detective series has stayed true to Robert Parker’s original script, I do feel that Ace Atkins has been able to realistically and sensitively added some far more modern elements into the story. The fact that this book blends those older and newer worlds so well together is a big part of the reason I enjoyed this so much.

On the one hand the plotline of “hard boiled detective protects mouthy politician” is a tried and true older style of storyline. And both Spenser and the author rise wonderfully to this occasion. But that would be over-simplifying the plot and story I feel. The current political climate is possibly more polarized than ever before and this story really highlights just how volatile this situation is. The extremes many people feel and are experiencing makes compelling reading to my mind – and the opinions that used to seem like hyperbole and caricatures really do ring as rather honest and current to my mind.

All this is rolled up very neatly into this book along with a healthy dose of snappy come backs and sarcasm which is par for the course with Spenser. But I do feel the author has managed to walk a very fine line between keeping much of the old Spenser novels and feeling alive while thoroughly modernizing it and keeping it current with today’s climate and experiences.

Readers who like a slightly more hard-boiled detective/PI story along with plenty of witty replies and banter between the characters should find this to be as good a read as I did. An enjoyable and well plotted book I shall happily read again in the future.