(2006)Sunny Randall novel, but not very good as she teams with Jesse Stone to figure out who killed a movie actress's sister. Randall not one of my favorite characters to begin with and pairing her with Stone & sliding them into bed with each other - a big mistake. (PW)Boston PI Sunny Randall, and Paradise, Mass., police chief Jesse Stone, join forces in this breezy, fast-paced whodunit. Buddy Bollen, a sleazy Hollywood producer, hires Sunny to protect his girlfriend, Erin Flint, a stunning action star who's trying to become major league baseball's first female player, for Buddy's franchise, the Connecticut Nutmegs. When one of Erin's entourage turns up dead, Sunny discovers that the deceased was Erin's younger sister, Misty, and that the two share a sordid past. Since the murder takes place on Jesse's quiet turf, the detective and the police chief, both of whom are on the rebound from failed marriages, must take each other's measure and are soon sizing each other up romantically.

Synopsis: 'Buddy Bollen is a C-list movie mogul who made his fortune producing films of questionable artistic merit. When Buddy hires Sunny Randall to protect his rising star and girlfriend, Erin Flint, Sunny knows from the start that the prickly, spoiled beauty won't make her job easy. and When Erin's sister, Misty, is found dead in the lavish home they share with sugar daddy Bollen, there doesn't seem to be a single lead worth pursuing.
But then Sunny meets Jesse Stone, chief of police in Paradise, Massachusetts, under whose jurisdiction the case falls. It immediately becomes clear that Jesse and Sunny have much in common. While searching for the killer, they learn an awful lot about each other - and themselves.
Tracking Misty's murderer reveals a host of seedy complications behind Erin's glamourous lifestyle as well as Buddy Bollen's entertainment empire, made up of shady film deals and mobsters out for revenge. But in a world where there's little difference between the good guys and the bad, exposing the killer could prove to be Sunny's undoing.' From the book jacket.

Review: Sunny is refreshing. Really glad the bad guys got theirs and the better bad guys were let go. ( )

This is not the first Parker I read, but I never marked which ones they were. And I've never sought them out. Somehow men just keep giving these books to me. And while they're not unreadable, I always walk away wondering, is this how you think people really are? At least this one went fast, and had slightly less superfluous description than the others I vaguely remember reading. ( )

This is the second runny Sandall Sunny Randall novel I've read and probably my favourite Parker novel to-date, despite all the weird let's cross over characters from all my series stuff that's going on. (Sunny gets the main protagonist of one series for a boy friend and already has the girl friend of the main protagonist from another series for a therapist.) In fact I like Sunny and her boy friend more than I like Spenser and his girlfriend, despite the Spenser novels being far more famous than any of Parker's other series.

Susan Silverman, Wunder-therapist, cures all Randall's man-issues with the twitch of an eyebrow, which is really annoying because that never happens back in reality and yet a very realistic approach is taken to the rest of the story, so it feels glaringly out of place.

One reason why I prefer this series to the Spenser books I've read is that there is much less macho posturing, because Randall isn't an exceptionally macho woman. Macho posturing, even if it is entirely appropriate to the characters and situation can irritate me if there is too much in too short a time.

In my review of [b:Melancholy Baby|69657|Melancholy Baby (Sunny Randall, #4)|Robert B. Parker|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1309209093s/69657.jpg|2847745] I was a little negative about Spike, the gay tough-guy friend. However, that is somewhat unfair in that gay characters appear in Parker's books where-as they are conspicuous by their absence in most novels. Parker's gay characters aren't mere stereotypes, either, even if they do suffer from character-recycling with only minor variations - which is true of Parker's straight characters, too.

One of the best Parker books I've read. ( )

All that gubbins over several books about Sunny and Richie being soulmates and Jesse and Jenn being soulmates and it's all disposed of in one romp-filled, love-at-first-case, pot-boiler. Shame. I'm sure Parker has gone to the Hollywood satire well before and there are definitely diminishing returns here. Spoiled starlet, mob money, pimps and agents with an odd bit of baseball improbability thrown in. Ho hum. ( )