Robert B. Parker phones in another Sunny Randall novel. I can’t say it any better, especially after this:<\/p>\n
“Smith and Wesson,” he said, “revolver…<\/b>” He bent over to look at the barrel opening. “Thirty-eight.”<\/p>\n
He leaned forward onto his hands and straightened his legs and did a kind of pushup so he could smell the gun.<\/p>\n
“Been fired recently.”<\/p>\n
He eased out of the pushup and got his feet under him and resumed his squat.<\/p>\n
“But not in this flower patch,” he said, “unless he bothered to clean up the brass.<\/b>“<\/p>\n
“I’d look over there,” Belson said, and nodded at the swan boat dock.<\/p>\n
Quirk continued to sit on his haunches, looking at the flower bed.<\/p>\n
“Stay with this, Frank,” Quirk said. “I’ll get some crime-scene techs over here, but I want you to be the only one touches the gun, okay?”<\/p>\n
Belson nodded.<\/p>\n
“You bag it, label it, take it to the lab, stay with it, wait for it.”<\/p>\n
“Okay, Marty,” Belson said.<\/p>\n
“Nobody but you and the lab guy touches it.”<\/p>\n
“Okay, Marty.”<\/p>\n
“I’ll get some divers to look in the water for the shell casing<\/b>,” Quirk said.<\/i><\/ul>\n
Friends, that’s a very basic misrepresentation of the difference between a revolver and a semi-automatic pistol. I would expect by now Dr. Parker know the difference. That this very basic mistake makes it into print doesn’t bode well.<\/p>\n
“It’s good,” my beautiful wife<\/a> said after she read the book first because I was mired in Anna Karenina<\/i><\/a>. “It’s focus is on the crime and not Sunny Randall’s life.”<\/p>\n Oh, but no. We have the extraneous chapters on Sunny meeting with Dr. Silverman, her therapist; chapters on Sunny reconciling with her ex-husband; chapters on Sunny interacting with her dysfunctional adult family and recognizing the dynamic about how it revolves around her father; and chapters on a sideplot about what a mess her friend Julie is.<\/p>\n Oh, and the crime. A serial killer returns after 20 years. Sunny knows immediately who it is and then has to prove it. The case turns on a discovery that, when thought about after the end of the book, is quite poorly handled as a means of moving the plot along, and we get the same sort of ending as in Shrink Rap<\/i>: Sunny puts herself in danger with one of the father figures in the background ready to save her, but she saves herself in a redemption of you-go-girl violence.<\/p>\n Sadly, I’m reading the Sunny Randall series (and probably the Jessie Stone series) out of habit now. I look slightly more forward to the Spenser books and the Westerns, but.<\/p>\n But.<\/p>\n