Family Honor (Sunny Randall Series #1) » (Reprint)

Featuring rapid-fire dialogue and spicy characters, Robert B. Parker's books are top-shelf reading for fans of detective crime novels. His Spenser series is several titles strong and an established classic; lately Parker has raised the stakes with two additional series (one featuring private eye Sunny Randle, the other featuring police chief Jesse Stone) that may eventually rival his beloved Boston P.I.

After rescuing a wealth family's missing teenage daughter from prostitution, private investigator Sunny Randall becomes the girl's unlikely bodyguard, fending off some serious mobsters and getting involved in a murder case and criminal conspiracy.

Boston Globe - Richard Dyer

You can't call Robert B. Parker's newest private eye a gumshoe because she prefers to wear black ankle boots; or, to accessorize her suit, she will pick out a ''fabulous pair of matching heels.'' Sonya ''Sunny'' Randall - cute, 5 feet 6, blond, 32, and at 115 pounds weighing in at about half of what Spenser does - favors a double-breasted blue pinstripe suit, white shirt open at the throat, and tiny silver hoop earrings along with the ankle boots when she's paying a formal call. Where to carry her Smith & Wesson .38 Special presents a fashion problem; her solution is a speed holster at the small of her back, under her jacket. You might say she looks a little like Helen Hunt, who asked for a series, got Family Honor, and will play Sunny in the movie.

At one point in her debut adventure, Sunny Randall remarks that it would be nice if she weighed 200 pounds and used to be a boxer, and Parker's readers will know she is not speaking theoretically. The form and formula of Family Honorare the ones Parker has honed through 26 Spenser novels and the two leadoff novels of a series featuring recovering alkie Jesse Stone sleuthing around the North Shore. There are good guys and bad guys and troubled characters caught between them. You know there will be excellent food, more dubious pop psychology, familiar Boston locations and traffic patterns, and lubricious conversation between sexual soul mates, not to mention some pretty spicy carryings-on. There will be a code of honor that does not coincide in every particular with the code of law. Sunny will need to be smart and tough, quick on the draw with tongue and gun, and she is. She can hold her own with Spenser in the sexual appetite department, and about her only failing is that she can't cook worth a damn.

Her back story is a bit unusual. Her father's a retired cop and her hapless, hopeless mother whines at her. Her ex-husband is the straight son of a mob boss. She still loves the guy, and he loves her, but they haven't found a way of making it work. In the meantime, a temporary expedient, if that's what you want to call it, comes along in the form of a hunky Boston cop named Brian who, Sunny notices, has ''thick black hair and a cute butt and a wonderful smile.''

Sunny wants to be an artist and is taking painting classes at the Museum School. She's had a show at a gallery on South Street (the Globe's art critic called her ''a primitivist with strong representational impulses''). To support herself, Sunny followed in her father's footsteps, but decided not to stay in uniform; now she's starting her own business.

The case is one Spenser would know how to handle, because he's handled it at least twice before. Millicent Patton - the troubled teenage daughter of politically ambitious, wealthy, and repellent parents - has run away from home and is hooking behind the Hynes Convention Center, like a character in Taming a Seahorse. Once temporarily rescued by Sunny, she must be rehabilitated - a process that parallels the emotional rebirth of Spenser's surrogate son Paul over several novels beginning with Early Afternoon.

Millicent knows too much about what some very bad people are up to, and she is therefore in extreme danger, and so is Sunny. Resourceful as Sunny is, she needs help; fortunately she has it on hand. Spenser has Susan to discuss therapeutic issues with; Sunny can turn to her friend Julia. Spenser has Hawk as buddy and backup, and Sunny has not only Richie, her ex, but Spike, a gay pal who is part owner of a restaurant called Beans & Rice near Quincy Market. Spike can cook, works out wearing his karate black belt, knows all the words to show tunes, and if he ever meets Spenser, will be able to compete not only with body blows but with withering repartee. One would like to know more about Spike's back story, and one day we probably will.

It all works out as you know it will but never exactly how you think it might, which is one enduring source of satisfaction in reading Parker. The bad guys are not just professional crooks but also smug therapists and headmistresses of tony schools. This is another source of satisfaction. ''She was tall and slim and fluty with a prominent nose and the kind of clenched-molar WASP drawl that girls used to acquire at Smith and Mount Holyoke,'' Sunny says of Miss Plum, the headmistress. ''She was wearing one of those hideous print-prairie dresses that are equally attractive on girls, women, and cattle.''

Because Parker is traveling across familiar territory that he mapped out himself, he moves with practiced ease, and the psychologizing seems better integrated than it has on previous occasions. And long before the end of Family Honor, it's clear that he has another winner, and now he can juggle three ongoing series. Actually, to be politically correct, he should launch a fourth, featuring Hawk and Spike, and then, to cap his career, a mega-novel, featuring Spenser, Stone, Sunny, Hawk, and Spike that reveals that one of them has been the supervillain behind everything all along (it would have to be Spenser, because Sunny was only 3 years old when Spenser's first recorded case appeared, in 1971). Naturally, such a book would have to be published posthumously, and no reader of Parker can tolerate the idea that he might predecease the rest of us. Still, one can fancy the idea that Sunny might one day learn to cook, and Spenser may puzzle Susan by showing up wearing a tiny silver hoop earring.