Let's get this settled right away: Sunny Randall is nothing like Spenser. True, she's a private eye in Boston with good connections to the cops, and she also knows a lot of bad guys. And yes, she happens to have a trusty sidekick named Spike, and a close friend who could easily be related to Susan Silverman, (Spenser's long-term companion). Oh, did I mention the cute dog? Aside from that, though, there's absolutely no similarity between this new series from Robert B. Parker and his long-running Spenser books. Just because the case Sunny is working on--finding a missing 15-year-old girl who has run away from her very rich parents--sounds similar to the Spenser favorite Thin Air doesn't mean Parker is repeating himself here. Think of it as more like a homage, the kind of thing the author took on when he agreed to finish Raymond Chandler's Poodle Springs. Only in this case it's a homage to himself--but what the hell.

Written specifically with Parker's good friend actress Helen Hunt in mind, Family Honor is all in good fun. At one point, a no-nonsense nun looks down at Sunny's bull terrier, who is lying on her back begging for a tummy rub. "What's wrong with this dog?" Sister said. "It is a dog, isn't it?"

Parker is so good that with one hand tied behind his back he can create characters that are more memorable than most writers can even when pounding away with both fists. In just a few short pages, he tells us all about Sunny's career as a painter--and about the complicated relationship between her cool policeman father and her irritating pseudo-feminist mother. Parker even makes a direct dig at Spenser (who, before turning to private investigating, had a short and fairly unsuccessful career in the boxing world). When the runaway girl questions Sunny's ability to protect her from dangerous criminals--"you're a girl like me, for crissake, what are you going to do?"--Sunny replies, "It would be nice if I weighed two hundred pounds and used to be a boxer. But I'm not, so we find other ways." Exactly. --Dick Adler


From Publishers Weekly
After 33 novelsAincluding more than two dozen Spenser mysteriesAbackboned by heros concerned with distinctly male codes of behavior, Parker presents his first female protagonist. She's Sunny Randall, and she's a keeper. In some ways, Sunny is a female Spenser. Like him, she's a former cop, now a Boston PI, quick with a pistol and a quip. She teams with an odd sidekick, Spike, as Spenser teams with Hawk, and she has a significant other, an ex-husband to Spenser's Susan. But Sunny is female, and as she explains in this wonderfully involving and moving novel, that means that she can't rely on the compass of "Be a man" to orient toward life. How to live correctly is this novel's theme, as it is in the best Spenser novels, and to explore that theme Parker borrows situations from those novels. Sunny is hired by a powerful family to find their runaway daughter, Millicent, who, it transpires, is hooking and needs rescuingAlike the girl in Taming a Sea-Horse. Once saved from the streets, Sunny trains Millicent in responsible adult waysAcooking, exerciseAas Spenser trained Paul in Early Autumn. But it's only a minor knock that Parker uses here elements honed in 30 years of writing, for he uses them with consummate skill. Millicent, it happens, witnessed a conspiracy to murder arising from her cold, ambitious parentsAher father aims to be governorAand the Italian mobsters who control them. The mobsters now want her dead, and Sunny, too, if need be. Sunny's fight to save Millicent and herself moves through a wide swath of Boston and its denizens, all etched in Parker's lean and exquisitely cadenced prose. The high suspense is equaled by the emotional power of Sunny's bonding with the damaged girl. A bravura performance, this novel launches what promises to be a series for the ages. BOMC main selection; film rights to Helen Hunt. (Sept.) Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From School Library Journal
-Sunny Randall, Parker's new detective, bears little resemblance to Spenser, his more famous creation. She is petite, attractive, educated, and artistic, whereas he is burly, gruff, and blunt. They do, however, share a penchant for zinging one-liners and shrewd leaps of deduction. Sunny, the ex-wife of the noninvolved son and nephew of the remnants of the Boston Mafia, wants to strike out on her own. The fact that she still loves Richie and hesitates to form new alliances somewhat cramps her style, but does aid her detecting. With an endearing bull terrier named Rosie; a gourmet cook, body-builder sidekick who happens to be gay; and a girlfriend who is a psychiatric social worker, Sunny has as many compatriots as Spenser, and puts them to equally good use. She is hired by wealthy politician Brock Patton to find his runaway daughter. This task is quickly accomplished with the help of Richie's family; what is not so easily discovered is why someone tries to kill Millicent-and Sunny-or why the girl's parents are so reticent and Millicent so fearful. While not much of a mystery, this is an engrossing, quick read and Millicent is a quirky, captivating adolescent. Parker has come up with another winning team.Susan H. Woodcock, Chantilly Regional Library, VA Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Private investigator Sunny Randall has a full array of family and friends who help her in her new business. Her complex life becomes even more so when she locates the runaway teenager whom she has been hired to find, only to decide that the young girl's home is not a healthy place; so Sunny keeps her while she investigates her clients. Her inquiries reveal some seemingly unrelated murders, and soon she finds herself killing a man to protect young Millicent. Andrea Thompson is easy to listen to; her husky voice is believably one of a self-described "cute" thirty-something blond who can get tough when necessary. Men, too, are portrayed with panache, whether it be a pimp or Sunny's attractive and devoted ex-husband. Most listeners will be drawn into the story immediately. Recommended for popular collections.-Juleigh Muirhead Clark, John D. Rockefeller Jr. Lib., Williamsburg, VA Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
Parker has ventured into new territory by custom designing a new character for the movies. Boston PI Sunny Randall, Parker's first female sleuth, was created expressly for actress Helen Hunt, who will play petite, blonde Sunny in the film version due out next year. A female in the lead role may sound like a radical departure for Parker, but sadly, once one penetrates the disguises, everything here looks all too familiar. If Sunny were big, beefy, and male, she'd be Spenser; Susan Silverman in the Spenser series has morphed into Julie, a suburban social worker; Rosie, a bull terrier, takes over for Pearl the Wonder Dog; and sidekick Hawk is now played by Spike, a tough-talking gay gourmet. The plot is pretty much a rerun from Parker's earlier books, too. Businessman Brock Patton hires Sunny to track down his missing teenage daughter Millicent. Sunny finds the kid but is reluctant to return her to her family, despite Millicent's bad attitude. Something is bothering the girl, and when two thugs show up at Sunny's loft with guns blazing, it's clear that Millicent is in deep trouble. Parker's quick quips, droll wit, and staccato dialogue are all on display here, so in spite of the tired plot and reworked characters, there's still plenty to enjoy. Besides, Parker remains one of the top sellers in the genre, and if he chooses to dress his hero up in drag, his fans will want to be first in line to admire the emperor's new clothes. Emily Melton


From Kirkus Reviews
What if Spenser were a woman? What if he were still by turns macho and sensitive, well-connected in both Boston's law community (because he was an ex-cop) and in Boston's underworld (because the ex-husband she'd walked out on were a mob scion who ran some legitimate saloons started with dirty money), great with weapons and wisecracks, but deep-down sententious and, yes, wise as ever? Chances are he'd be just as potent a fantasy as a woman, but more convincing than when he was a manand chances are he'd walk and talk just like Sunny Randall, the painter/private eye politically connected banker Brock Patton and his well-groomed wife Betty call when their daughter Millicent, 15, runs away from home. Finding a runaway who must be turning tricks on Boston's streets to survive is no problem, Sunny soon realizes; the problem is figuring out what to do with a runaway who doesn't want to go home, identifying the people she's afraid of, and protecting her from them when every promising lead she gets about how to keep them away from Sunny turns up dead. Fans of Spenser (Hush Money, p. 108, etc.) will be happy to know that Sunny, who doesn't mind fighting back hard, takes her grievances all the way to the top en route to revelations that make her feel ``as if I'd spent my life in a convent and was just emerging.'' Come to think of it, Sunny's also just like Helen Hunt, who'll be playing her in the movie scheduled for shooting next year. Nice, huh? (Film rights to Helen Hunt, Book-of-the-Month Club main selection; author tour) -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Book Description
The author of the bestselling Spenser novels introduces a heroine unlike any other-private eye Sunny Randall. She's street-smart, sexy, and suddenly thrown into a Boston mob war where high-stakes politics and low-down killers conspire to make Sunny's first case her last.

"Robert B. Parker has another winner...Sunny can hold her own with Spenser."-Boston Globe "Sharp and funny." -Washington Post

"Sleek and seductive...one of the best."-Publishers Weekly

FROM OUR EDITORS

The Barnes & Noble Review
September 1999

break Prepare to Meet Sunny

Remarkably, Family Honor is the third new novel Robert B. Parker has published in the last ten months. Even more remarkably, each of those three books represents an entry in a separate, ongoing series. Hush Money is the 26th novel to feature Spenser, still Parker's most durable and popular character. Trouble in Paradise marks the second appearance of Massachusetts police chief Jesse Stone, and Family Honor is the inaugural volume in a brand-new series featuring a feisty female private investigator named Sonya "Sunny" Randall.

Sunny is an attractive, 35-year-old ex-cop who makes her living as a detective while assiduously pursuing a secondary career as a painter. She lives alone, her only companion an undersized bull terrier named Rosie, and is recently — painfully — divorced from saloon keeper Richie Burke, whose father and uncle are prominent members of the Boston Irish mob and who still owns a very large piece of Sunny's heart.

Sunny is a likable, credible character surrounded by an equally credible cast of supporting players, among them her stolid, quietly supportive father, himself a retired policeman; her pseudo-feminist mother; her closest friend, a slightly neurotic professional therapist named Julie; and a gay, extremely lethal martial arts expert and restaurateur named Spike. Sonya herself represents Parker's first attempt to view the world from a feminine perspective, but she is nonethelessafamiliar, even archetypal, Parker character: a woman who is cut from the same ethical cloth as Spenser and who is determined to live her life according to a highly individual system of values and beliefs. Like Spenser, she loves good food, good sex, books, art, conversation, and friendship. (Unlike Spenser, she doesn't know how to cook, but is trying, belatedly, to learn.)

Like Sunny, the story line of Family Honor is an effective mixture of the old and the new, the fresh and the familiar. As the novel begins, Sunny has just been hired to locate the runaway teenage daughter — a lost, unloved child named Millicent Patton — of an upper-crust Boston family for whom "dysfunctional" would be too mild a term. Sunny quickly locates Millicent and just as quickly liberates her from the enterprising pimp who has taken her under his wing. When Millicent adamantly refuses to return her home, Sunny — who can sense how damaged and deeply frightened Millicent has become — takes the girl in, deliberately refusing to return her to her outraged, unsympathetic parents. In a series of scenes deliberately reminiscent of Early Autumn, one of the earliest, and best, of the Spenser novels, Sunny becomes a de facto parent and takes it upon herself to teach her house guest how to become a functional human being.

In a simultaneous set of developments, Sunny discovers that Millicent is in very real danger, having accidentally eavesdropped on a compromising conversation between her mother and a local thug named Cathal Kragan. Sunny and Millicent go underground in Spike's apartment, and Sunny begins an investigation that leads from the profligate — and well-photographed — sex lives of Millicent's parents to a tawdry series of revelations that threaten both the political aspirations of Millicent's banker father, Brock Patton, and the long-term plans of a high-ranking member of the Mafia's New England branch. By the time Sunny — with the aid of Spike, her ex-husband Richie, and Richie's well-connected relatives — has sorted matters out, her life has changed in a number of ways. By the novel's end, she has killed to defend herself, has put her life and reputation repeatedly at risk, and has been forced to reexamine the most fundamental — and unresolved — relationship of her life: her aborted marriage to Richie Burke.

Outside of Parker's surprising — and surprisingly effective — use of a female protagonist, Family Honor contains nothing that is particularly startling or new. Nevertheless, it works. Parker has always been a clean, concise stylist with an impeccable ear for dialogue and a flawless sense of pace, and this time out, he is at the top of his game. Family Honor is an intelligent, engaging, immensely readable narrative that, once begun, is virtually impossible to set aside. Sunny Randall (who is set to be played by Oscar winner Helen Hunt in the forthcoming film adaptation) is both a vital, sympathetic creation and a perfect vehicle for Parker's characteristic reflections on the importance of living an authentic, fully realized life. She is the heart and soul of one of the best novels Parker has produced in several years, and I look forward to encountering her again.

—Bill Sheehan

Bill Sheehan reviews horror, suspense, and science fiction for Cemetery Dance, The New York Review of Science Fiction, and other publications. He is working on a book-length critical study of the fiction of Peter Straub.

ANNOTATION

PI Sunny Randall of Boston searches for a rich man's daughter who ran away to be a prostitute. After finding her Sunny must guard her because the girl is on a hit list. She witnessed a conspiracy involving state government.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Sunny Randall is a Boston P.I. and former cop, a college graduate, an aspiring painter, a divorcee, and the owner of a miniature bull terrier named Rosie. Hired by a wealthy family to locate their teenage daughter, Sunny is tested by the parents' preconceived notion of what a detective should be. With the help of underworld contacts she tracks down the runaway Millicent, who has turned to prostitution, rescues her from a vicious pimp, and finds herself, at thirty-four, the unlikely custodian of a difficult teenager when the girl refuses to return to her family.. "But Millicent's problems are rooted in much larger crimes than running away, and Sunny, now playing the role of bodyguard, is caught in a shooting war with some very serious mobsters. She turns for help to her ex-husband, Richie, himself the son of a mob family, and to her dearest friend, Spike, a flamboyant and dangerous gay man. Heading this unlikely alliance, Sunny must solve at least one murder, resolve a criminal conspiracy that reaches to the top of state government, and bring Millicent back into functional young-womanhood.

SYNOPSIS

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.

FROM THE CRITICS

Richard Dyer - Boston Globe

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.

Ann Prichard - USA Today

This book delivers plenty of pace and lots of action.

Katherine Dillin - Christian Science Monitor

An easygoing, easy-to-read Parker is just right for a hot summer afternoon when a Dashiell Hammett can seem a dash dense.

Publishers Weekly

After 33 novels--including more than two dozen Spenser mysteries--backboned by heros concerned with distinctly male codes of behavior, Parker presents his first female protagonist. She's Sunny Randall, and she's a keeper. In some ways, Sunny is a female Spenser. Like him, she's a former cop, now a Boston PI, quick with a pistol and a quip. She teams with an odd sidekick, Spike, as Spenser teams with Hawk, and she has a significant other, an ex-husband to Spenser's Susan. But Sunny is female, and as she explains in this wonderfully involving and moving novel, that means that she can't rely on the compass of "Be a man" to orient toward life. How to live correctly is this novel's theme, as it is in the best Spenser novels, and to explore that theme Parker borrows situations from those novels. Sunny is hired by a powerful family to find their runaway daughter, Millicent, who, it transpires, is hooking and needs rescuing--like the girl in Taming a Sea-Horse. Once saved from the streets, Sunny trains Millicent in responsible adult ways--cooking, exercise--as Spenser trained Paul in Early Autumn. But it's only a minor knock that Parker uses here elements honed in 30 years of writing, for he uses them with consummate skill. Millicent, it happens, witnessed a conspiracy to murder arising from her cold, ambitious parents--her father aims to be governor--and the Italian mobsters who control them. The mobsters now want her dead, and Sunny, too, if need be. Sunny's fight to save Millicent and herself moves through a wide swath of Boston and its denizens, all etched in Parker's lean and exquisitely cadenced prose. The high suspense is equaled by the emotional power of Sunny's bonding with the damaged girl. A bravura performance, this novel launches what promises to be a series for the ages. BOMC main selection; film rights to Helen Hunt. (Sept.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

KLIATT