Melancholy Baby

If the Spenser books are largely about the way in which the lead characters’ interior lives are hidden away, the Sunny Randall books (and Jesse Stone books, for that matter) are about revealing interior lives. Half of Melancholy Baby consists of Sunny’s sessions with special guest star Susan Silverman from the Spenser books–during therapy. I finished it on the airplane back from the AGC, when I wasn’t comatose.

The Sunny Randall books have never really clicked with me as much as the Spenser books; just as the Jesse Stone books can seem too bleak, the Sunny books seemed too facile, somehow. Sunny came across to me as Spenser in a skirt. That’s no longer the case. Parker is a very good writer, not just on the level of snappy dialogue (he’s one of the best dialogue writers I’ve seen) but in his most recent books, at characterization. While perhaps not up to the level of Gunman’s Rhapsody, this one, as with his last Spenser book, is digging deep and hitting hard in places. The overall effect is of a writer who has moved beyond series detective novels, and now uses genre as a skeleton on which to hang novels of character.