Melancholy Baby (Sunny Randall)
by Robert B. Parker
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Book Summary Information
Author: Robert B. ParkerEdition: Mass Market Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2005-10-04
ISBN: 0425204219
Number of pages: 304
Publisher: Berkley
Book Reviews of Melancholy Baby (Sunny Randall)
Book Review: A mystery in between visits to the shrink
Summary: 3 Stars
I've read all four books in the Sunny Randall series so far. My general feeling is that Sunny's psychology is far more interesting than the mysteries in these books.
In this book, we have sort of a flashback to the first book in the series, "Family Honor," where Sunny takes in one of the characters in her investigation to protect her. In this case, it's 20-year old Sarah who is convinced she's not her parents' biological child despite her parents' assertions to the contrary. Using some of her trust fund money, she hires Sunny to investigate and it isn't long before Sarah's life is threatened along with Sunny's. As we've come to expect, Sunny will draw on her ex-husband's organized crime family to help her out in a tough spot or two...and her pal Spike. And she'll gush over her dog Rosie at least once every page or two.
The mystery in this book gets solved, but not real tidily. We're left with some dangling threads regarding Sarah, Sarah's real mother, Sarah's adoptive mother, and few other characters. The most enjoyable part of the book wasn't really the mystery (that part was actually a bit lame), but rather Sunny finally starting to come to grips with why she can't live with ex-husband Richey or without him. Her shrink, Dr. Susan Silverman, manages to sound like every cliche we've ever heard: "How did that make you feel?" "Let's talk about that." "What do *you* think it means?" Her practice seems to consist entirely of asking 5 or 6 questions comprised of less than 10 words in every 55-minute session, and then listening to Sunny do her own psychological assessments based on those handful of questions.
Out of the four Sunny Randall books so far, I'd rank them as follows:
1) Family Honor
2) Shrink Wrap
3) Melancholy Baby
4) Perish Twice
In other words, we're learning more about Sunny, but the books themselves aren't necessarily getting better.
Summary of Melancholy Baby (Sunny Randall)
When Sunny Randall helps a young woman locate her birth parents, she uncovers the dark truth about her own past.
Some of Robert B. Parker's most distinctive novels over the years (God Save the Child, Early Autumn, Ceremony, etc.) have centered on young people in trouble, so his return to that theme in Melancholy Baby is hardly a surprise. What's more remarkable is how deftly he uses the case of an angry, confused college student searching for the facts about her family background as a means to pry open the hardly less troubled psyche of Boston private eye Sonya "Sunny" Randall, a character at serious risk of one day outshining Parker's better-known but less reflective gumshoe, Spenser.
Twenty-one-year-old trust-fund kid Sarah Markham suspects that her parents aren't really related to her at all. "They can't find my birth certificate," she tells Sunny in amazement. "They don?t remember which hospital I was born in." This isn't the sort of inquiry Sunny likes to take on, especially not now, when her ex-husband of five years, Richie Burke--whom she still hasn't given up loving--is marrying another woman. However, Sunny needs a distraction from self-pity, and she can see that "everything about Sarah and her parents seemed fraudulent ... like something that had been built on the cheap, with shoddy materials and no craft, to conceal something unhealthy and mean." As she tears at this façade, though, traveling to Illinois and New York City in order to expose secrets not only in Sarah's father's past but in the history of a holier-than-thou radio celeb, Sunny discovers that her client isn't the only person being kept in the dark. But is it worth destroying Sarah's sense of herself--not to mention attracting the malicious notice of well-armed thugs--to set the record straight? And can Sunny even accomplish this, while struggling (with help from Spenser's psychiatrist girlfriend, Susan Silverman) to understand why she's 37 years old and "just can?t be married"?
Any halfway-conscious reader will spot the solution to this story's mystery from miles off, and Parker's use of central-casting figures--the hypocritical moralizer, the oleaginous but natty shyster--should earn him free admission to a "How to Create Credible Characters" seminar. Still, it's hard not to be charmed by a novel that's as willing as Melancholy Baby is to knock the pins out from under its protagonist, and see where the angst falls. At Dr. Silverman's rates, Sunny had better figure her life out soon. --J. Kingston Pierce
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