Parker-inspired nominees

Beloved Cambridge crime novelist Robert B. Parker has been dead for three years, but his fingerprints are all over this year’s Edgar Award nominees. Three best-novel nominees pay tribute to Parker in a book nominated for best critical/biographical work. That book is “In Pursuit of Spenser: Mystery Writers on Robert B. Parker and the Creation of an American Hero” (Smart Pop), edited by Otto Penzler. The three nominees are Dennis Lehane for “Live by Night” (HarperCollins), Lyndsay Faye for “The Gods of Gotham” (Penguin), and Ace Atkins for “The Lost Ones” (Putnam). Atkins, Parker fans well know, was hired by Parker’s widow, Joan, to continue Parker’s Spenser novels. “Lost Ones” is Atkins’s own series.