By OLINE H. COGDILL

If you’re a fan of mystery fiction—and of course you are, because you are on this site—then you know that several authors can write about the same city, yet bring a different perspective on that setting.

atkinsace kickback
As I have said before, the Los Angeles of Michael Connelly, Robert Crais, and Denise Hamilton is a different city in each of these authors’ novels.

The characters become so real to us readers that we half-expect them to somehow know each other.

And that has happened before.

Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch and Robert Crais’ Elvis Cole have each made uncredited cameos in the other’s novels. Sara Paretsky’s V.I. Warshawski once commented on how she admired the organizational skills of Kinsey Millhone, who is making her last appearances as Sue Grafton’s series winds down with X, due out in August.

But in one of the latest twists, a character meets an author.

In Ace Atkins' Robert B. Parker’s Kickback, Boston private detective Spenser gets himself involved in the usual complicated case.

In this fourth outing by Atkins, Spenser agrees to help a single mother whose teenage son—along with other teens from a small town—has been denied a right to counsel and routinely sentenced to a “boot camp” for relatively minor offenses.

Without giving anything away, Spenser makes the evening news and his story is reported by Hank Phillippi Ryan.

This is a natural reference.

In addition to being the award-winning author of the Jane Ryland series, Ryan also is an award-winning television journalist, having won 32 Emmys and 13 Edward R. Murrow awards for her reporting.

In Ryan’s series, Jane Ryland, who makes her latest appearance in Truth Be Told, also is a reporter but she works for a newspaper.

Who knows, maybe Spenser’s story also made the front page of Jane’s newspaper. Atkins doesn't tell us.

spenser-meets-hank-phillippi-ryan
4941