These authors risk the wrath of readers to keep book franchises alive

For the man anointed with keeping Robert B. Parker's most beloved character alive and quipping, it's not a job, but a sacred trust.

Parker wrote nearly 70 novels, 40 of them about Spenser, the literary, wisecracking Boston private eye. He was writing yet another in January 2010 when his wife, Joan, found him dead at his desk, felled, at 77, by a heart attack.

"When my father died, there were a couple of unfinished manuscripts and we didn't know what to do," his son David told The Post. "The publisher suggested we find people to complete them, and it morphed into working with Ace Atkins, who's essentially a Robert B. Parker scholar."