Last year in "Early Autumn," Spenser made a man of a 15-year-old boy vicitimized by his affectless parents. "Ceremony" seems an alternative version of that novel. This time the child with the destructive parents is a girl, a high-school dropout who volunteers for a life of prostitution, then finds herself a prisoner of it: finally, when freed by Spenser, she finds she has no other talent, no other aim in life. Spenser is faced with an interesting moral decision: what is best for this homeless child? Unpaid, saddled with a job he never wanted but now cannot let go, he's a modern paladin. "It's a way to live," he says. "Anything else is confusion." "How did you ever get to be so big without growing up?" Susan asks. It's lines like that, puncturing the private-eye ethic without leaving lasting damage, which make the Spenser novels so engaging.
The contrast between Spenser and Susan's loving sexiness and the calculated sexual exploitation of children works very nicely here. Another asset is Spenser's sidekick, an improbable, ever-loyal, brutally efficient black man named Hawk. Parker is treading on thin ice with him—his black man does the dirty work the white man really shouldn't do (in "Early Autumn" Hawk shot the mobster, who needed shooting, when Spenser couldn't)—but he slides over it with good humor. And in "Ceremony" he brings off with good taste a story about an appalling subject. (pp. 71-2)
Peter S. Prescott, "The New Stellar Sleuths: 'Ceremony'," in Newsweek (copyright 1982, by Newsweek, Inc.; all rights reserved; reprinted by permission), Vol. XCIX, No. 23, June 7, 1982, pp. 71-2.
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