Twisted Romance in the Woods

It’s been a very long while since I thought about Robert B. Parker’s 1979 standalone tale, Wilderness, but Jake Hinkson reminded me of it yesterday with this Criminal Element post. In that novel, he recalls, Parker “tells the story of a middle-aged author named Aaron Newman who writes macho books but faces a real-life crisis when he witnesses a murder. He fingers the killer--a gangster named Adolph Karl--to the cops, but when his wife, a fiercely independent professor named Janet, is terrorized by the bad guys, Newman and Janet decide to strike back.” Hinkson calls Wilderness “a flawed book to be sure, but for Parker fans it will help to illuminate some of the darker themes that run beneath the surface of so much of the author’s work.”