Spare Change

(G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 291 pages)

by Robert B. Parker

ROBERT B. Parker’s three series characters — Sunny Randall, Jesse Stone and Spenser — have a charming habit of wandering into one another’s books.Sunny, a Boston private detective, and Jesse, the police chief of mythical Paradise, Massachusetts, even jumped into bed together in High Profile<$>, a Jesse Stone novel published earlier this year.

But with Spare Cge<$>, the latest Sunny Randall novel, the author recycles so many characters that the book is something of a family reunion for regular Parker readers. Captain Healey, the state police homicide detective familiar to readers of the Jesse Stone novels, is on hand to help Sunny with her investigation.

So are Capt. Martin Quirk and his sidekick Sgt. Frank Belson, Boston cops originally introduced in the Spenser private eye novels. And Spenser’s sweetheart, the oh-so-perfect Susan Silverman, also makes an appearance as Sunny’s psychologist.

That our favourite Boston good guys would all know one another is certainly plausible; and it is reassuring to know that in the violent and chaotic world in which they have chosen to work, they can turn to one another for support.

As the story begins, Sunny’s father, a retired Boston cop named Phil Randall, has been asked to help with an investigation. A serial killer is stalking Boston, leaving three coins beside the bloodied head of each victim. The case bears an eerie resemblance to serial murders Phil investigated, and failed to solve, 20 years ago.

It is Phil who decides to bring his daughter into the case, and Sunny quickly finds herself at the centre of things.

After interviewing a handful of people, she thinks she has found the killer: Bob Johnson, a glib accountant who relishes the idea that he’s a suspect. As the story unfolds, both he and Sunny court danger, meeting several times to have a few drinks, flirt and draw one another out about the case.

There’s something sexual about the way Johnson talks about the murders, Sunny thinks. The best word she can come up with to describe it is “icky”.

Soon, the case takes a disturbing turn as the killer starts choosing victims who resemble Sunny.

This is the sixth book in a series that began with Family Honor in 1999, after Helen Hunt asked Parker to create a character she could play on the screen. (No movie featuring Sunny has yet been made, however.)

While the books, like Parker’s six Jesse Stone novels and 34 Spenser novels, have sold well, they have not always read well, Parker having trouble getting the character right.

At times, Sunny came off as oddly masculine, like Spenser in makeup and tight jeans, and at other times as quivering hysteric beset with personal and family troublesIn Spare Change<$>, those troubles haven’t gone away. Sunny’s on-again, off-again relationship with Rich, the ex-husband from a mobbed-up family, is on again. She’s still trying to figure out, with Susan Silverman’s help, why she dumped the man she passionately loves in the first place. And her relationship with her alcoholic mother and her two ditsy sisters remains strained.

But this time, Parker makes it work, the character of Sunny emerging as strong yet unmistakably feminine, and the family stuff enhancing the main story line rather than being an annoying distraction, as it had been in earlier books.

Parker’s prose is as precise and economical as always — nearly measuring up to the best of the Stone novels. And the scene in which Sunny deals with two men who crudely proposition her and one of her sisters is worth the price of the book.