lieutenant (later promoted to captain, as mentioned in Back Story). In Massachusetts, each county District Attorney's office has a squad of State Police Detectives assigned to their office to conduct investigations of major crimes committed in their jurisdictions. Scotch is Spenser's drink of celebration. This is mostly having to do with an encounter with a bear while bird hunting in his teens. Spenser seems to agree with William Faulkner's assessment of Scotch — "that brown liquor which not women, not boys and children, but only hunters drank." He also frequently drinks Irish Whiskey, sometimes just as a nod to his ethnic heritage, saying “The thing I like about Irish whiskey is that the more you drink the smoother it goes down. Of course that's probably true of antifreeze as well, but illusion is nearly all we have.” One of the inconsistencies or possible cases of retroactive continuity within the Spenser series surrounds his mother. In some of the early books he refers to his mother and, in 1981's A Savage Place, for example, he quotes advice his mother gave him. By A Catskill Eagle, Spenser states that his mother died during labor and he was delivered via Caesarean section, i.e. "not of woman born" as Parker has Spenser put it; he was raised by his father and his two maternal uncles, all of them carpenters, who do not appear in the series. Spenser received a football scholarship to Holy Cross, where he played strong safety. Spenser injured his knee and dropped out because he did not have the funds to complete his schooling. He took up boxing, and met Hawk, a tough man skilled with firearms, and Henry Cimoli, the owner of a gym where Spenser and Hawk still work out. His family unit beyond his near-fraternal relationship with Hawk is essentially Susan Silverman, an unofficial foster son named Paul Giacomin, and a series of dogs all named Pearl after Spenser's childhood dog of the same breed, a German Shorthaired Pointer. Silverman, originally a high school guidance counselor, continues to assist Spenser in his cases after becoming a Harvard-trained Ph.D. psychologist. Giacomin, initially an awkward, unsocialized teenager, becomes a professional actor and dancer. Hawk The other major character in the Spenser novels is his close friend Hawk, originally introduced in the fourth novel Promised Land. An African American, Hawk is an equally tough but somewhat shady echo of Spenser himself.