Parker is the epitome of the hero as pure will, whose Nietzschean drive to exert power cannot be stopped by merely human forces. His mastery of the violent arts is, however, complemented by a thorough knowledge of how the world really works, and it is this that differentiates him from most of the heroes of hard-boiled fiction. A character such as Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer simply wades into a situation and keeps punching and shooting until the bad guys are vanquished; and even Raymond Chandler's much more intellectually-inclined Philip Marlowe sees himself as a gadfly who stirs up trouble without necessarily being able to control the consequences. Parker, on the other hand, knows the right buttons to push and the right people to threaten in order to achieve the desired result, which may help to explain why this series of novels has earned both respectful critical attention and...