- Paperback: 224 pages
- Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd; New edition edition (30 Jun 1988)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0140099018
- ISBN-13: 978-0140099010
- Product Dimensions: 17.8 x 10.8 x 2 cm
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 56,088 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Did you know you can trade in your old books for an Amazon.co.uk Gift Card to spend on the things you want? Plus, get an extra £5 Gift Certificate when you trade in books worth £10 or more before June 30, 2012. Visit the Books Trade-In Store for more details. |
Product details |
More About the Author
Tag this product(What's this?)Think of a tag as a keyword or label you consider is strongly related to this product.
Tags will help all customers organise and find favourite items. |
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
There are no customer reviews yet on Amazon.co.uk.
5 star
4 star
3 star
2 star
1 star
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
20 reviews
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful
Once again April Kyle complicates live for Spenser
18 Feb 2001
Format:Mass Market Paperback
"Taming a Sea-Horse" finds Spenser returning to simpler pursuits after the imitation James Bond heights of our hero's previous story, "A Catskill Eagle." Susan Silverman is back in Spenser's life with minimal mention of the hell she put him through in the last couple of books when she was off in California. But they are very happy together, although they now find very little time to do any real cooking. The problem this time around is an old one revisited: April Kyle, the teenage prostitute Spenser saved in "Ceremony" has left the call girl service of Patricia Utley and has started turning tricks for Robert Rambeaux, the man she supposedly loves. Spenser does a little investigating but before he gets too deep into the matter April disappears, Rambeaux is beaten up by somebody other than Spenser, and one of the hookers our hero intereviewed is murdered. Once again, there is much more to the case than meets the eye.
This is an intimate Spenser novel, which was certainly a wise move on Robert B. Parker's part after the epic scale of its predecessor. At the end of "Ceremony," Spencer and Susan were planning on taking April to meet Mrs. Utley because they could not come up with a better solution and we could only guess at what would become of the young girl. Now the gap of the last four years has been filed in and our hero has another chance to help the young girl, whom I suspect might be on her way to being the surrogate daughter in Spenser's growing symbolic family unit. While "Taming a Sea-Horse" might seem to cover some of the ground Robert B. Parker has covered before, there is always some sort of twist, and it is not understatement to say that this time around the story ends not with a bang, but with a whimper.
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful
Run-of-the-mill Spenser
23 April 2002
Format:Mass Market Paperback
Robert B. Parker, Taming a Sea-Horse (Delacorte, 1986)
One of the fun things about Robert Parker's Spenser novels is that way folks keep popping up and making Spenser's life miserable. In this case, the poppee is April Kyle, a prostitute Spenser encountered a few years before. That story didn't end to anyone's satisfaction, least of all Spenser's. Now it's time for him to find out why. April has left the employ of the madam with whom Spenser set her up to turn tricks for her new boyfriend, a woodwind player struggling through Julliard. Or so everyone's been told. Spenser starts asking around, and the more he asks, the less he finds out. Typical, huh?
In no time, one of April's associates who Spenser talked to is dead, and the pimp has had his face rearranged. There's more to this than a runaway streetwalker. Enough "more," at least, for another Spenser novel.
This isn't one of Parker's more elegant works, but then, a bad Spenser is still better than most anything else. It has all the hallmarks of Robert Parker. There's some cooking, some literature, a lot of snappy one-liners, and inherent readability. What's missing is the necessity to down the whole thing in one long swallow that pervades such Spenser gems as A Catskill Eagle and Early Autumn. But that's comparable to a pizza with one slice gone; the rest will still taste good. ***
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Spenser's hooker fetish
25 Oct 2001
Format:Hardcover
Is Susan the only woman in Spenser's life who isn't a hooker? I know I'm reading the books out of order, but just in grabbing them off the shelves randomly-Ceremony, Mortal Stakes, Thin Air, Taming a Seahorse all feature Spenser riding to the rescue of once or current hookers. Oh well, in this one April Kyle, the teenage girl that Spenser and Susan thought would have a nice life as a prostitute disappears from the fancy upscale house they put her in and is doomed to work the streets. While searching for her, Spenser meets ***gasp in amazement*** another young hooker. Naturally she's not a coked-up, used up street walker, she's another in Spenser's long line of beautiful street corner girls. The girl ends up dead which leads to Spenser beating up her father, tracking her to a Hefner/Flynt clone whose men's clubs are actually highclass whorehouses, and to the club's Caribbean resort which leads to another gorgeous hooker and so on. Who killed the hooker and her pimp? Don't know, April, I assume, will go back to hooking in a manner Spenser prefers. I found the ending very puzzling-almost like Parker had to maintain a page count and he had to finish it up with no time for tying things up. There were about 20 more pages of story could have been wrung out of this one.
Were these reviews helpful?
Let us know
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
