Perish twice

Mary Lou Goddard is the CEO of Great Strides, a feminist organization dedicated to the advancement of women in all areas of life. She is being stalked; her office was vandalized and threatening messages left on her answering machine. She hires former cop and Boston private investigator Sunny Randall to track down her tormentor. It's not long before Sunny has confronted Lawrence B. Reeves. Soon thereafter, Reeves is found dead; the cops call it suicide, but Sunny says murder. When an employee of Goddard's is also killed, Sunny knows something is up. The case leads to Boston's prostitution industry, which brings Sunny to the attention of mobster Tony Marcus, a familiar bad guy from Parker's Spenser novels. Meanwhile, Sunny tries to guide her dysfunctional sister and her best friend, Julie--who has a master's in social work--through their divorces. The crime angle is vintage Parker: heart-racing action, stilleto-sharp dialogue, menacing tough guys, a very likable narrator/protagonist, and a moving romance. But Sunny as streetwise therapist, guiding her sister and best pal through the pitfalls of male-female relationships, quickly becomes tedious. There's plenty to enjoy here but plenty to skim past, too. Expect increased demand when the film version of Parker's previous Sunny Randall novel (Family Honor [BKL Ag 99]), starring Helen Hunt, appears later this year. --Wes Lukowsky

Boston PI Sunny Randle, given her second outing here, is to Parker's veteran PI Spenser as Pepsi is to Coke: a bit lighter and sweeter, but still the real deal. And in the literary equivalent of a blind taste test, you'd be hard pressed to tell them apart; this second Sunny novel, even more than her first (Family Honor), is a Spenser book wearing a skirt. About now, the author's fans might be yearning for a change of pace of the sort Parker has offered in his stand-alones and his Jesse Stone series; still, what's here is quite good. The novel revolves around assorted couples' dysfunctional liaisons. In one significant subplot, Sunny's obnoxious and spoiled sister, Elizabeth, hires Sunny to trail her husband, whom she suspects of having an affair; when Sunny catches the lothario, Elizabeth leaves him and begins to sleep around. In another, Sunny's old therapist pal, Julie, is having troubles with her beloved and is also starting to date. And in the novel's main plotline, a lesbian activist who hires Sunny to protect her from a stalker also turns out to be stuck in a web of infidelityÄand murder. Two killingsÄa man Sunny pinpoints as the stalker, and a woman who works for the activistÄeventually bring Sunny into the orbit of scary black gangster Tony Marcus, who runs prostitution in Boston. The scenes involving Sunny, Marcus and Marcus's underlings crackle with tension and sometimes violence; the rest of the novel presents a wholly absorbing puzzle of confused motives and whodunits that Sunny picks at as doggedly as any PI going. With its smooth blend of mystery, action and psychological probings, this is yet another first-rate, though not innovative, offering from a reliable old master. 15-city author tour. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Artist/shamus Sunny Randall’s second case (Family Honor, 1999) might be called A Tale of Two Stalkers. The first is Lawrence B. Reeves, the part-time Boston U. philosophy prof who won’t stop hassling Mary Lou Goddard, the grimly lesbian corporate consultant whose can-do public image would take a nose-dive if it were known that she was being stalked, especially by a former lover. The second is Sunny’s own sister, Elizabeth Reagan, who’s so angry at her unfaithful husband Hal that she can’t stop following him. The second case is piffle, nothing more than an excuse for Sunny to show how much stronger she is than her intolerant, helpless big sister. But the first leads to three violent deaths—before you realize it’s piffle, too: first, there’s Mary Lou’s research assistant Gretchen Crane, presumably killed in mistake for her; then Lawrence B. Reeves, whose apparent suicide conveniently allows the police to close the books on Gretchen; and Jermaine Lister, the rising pimp Gretchen had talked to in connection with her research on prostitution. Sunny identifies all the players early on, but never does figure out who’s playing what role. Instead she gets men to do all the heavy lifting: her ex-husband’s mobbed-up relatives threaten the key player into talking; the player solves the muddled case for her; and two male friends wait outside the showdown just in case. For all her vaunted independence, Sunny seems this time as if she’s just revving her engine waiting for her celebrated colleague Spenser (Hugger Mugger, p. 214) to show up. Author tour