68 of 70 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Jesse and Sunny, moving forward., February 25, 2010
So let's deal with the elephant in the room right away: how does one review a book when the author unexpectedly dies while it's being read?
The death of Dr. Parker was a shock to the genre community, to be sure. Eulogies steeped in eloquence can be found with just a few clicks. The eloquence is deserved, Parker saved the PI genre. That is not debatable. So we will leave those eulogies for you to find (we recommend the one from the NY Times), and say, going forward, this review takes that sad fact into account not one bit.
Split Image is more accurately described as a Jesse Stone/Sunny Randall Novel, both characters are present, together and apart.
Our story begins as Sunny visits Jesse for professional consult. She's been hired to look into an "eccentric" religious organization based in Paradise known as The Renewal. Her clients are parents whose daughter has moved into their house in Paradise. Sunny isn't quite sure if her clients are worried about their daughter or their reputation, and she starts her investigation by getting a briefing from the Paradise Police Chief, with whom she has an interesting romantic relationship. This briefing is filled with the banter that Parker is most famous for, and we immediately feel at home with these two. We like the fact that they are each others' refuge from bad situations in their own lives--Jesse's, the near-constant disappointment brought by his ex-wife, Jenn; Sunny, the irresolvable distance between her and her ex-husband, Richie.
During their chat, a body is discovered in Paradise, that of Mob Enforcer Petrov Ognowski. Jesse leaves Sunny to her business, and start digging. He finds that Petrov was a soldier for Reggie Galen, who lives in a very fashionable house, next door to a nearly-identical house where resides Knocko Moynihan, another "colorful" fella. He then finds out that both gentlemen are married to....wait for it....IDENTICAL TWINS. Rebecca and Robbie, the Bang Bang Twins.
Let your minds get busy, because Parker clearly did the same thing. Two women, growing up separate but the same. Dressing with the same clothes. Making every effort to be indistinguishable. Sleeping with each others' boyfriends, etc.
Parker has big fun exploring the psychosis of all this, from Jesse interviewing the parents, to being a temporary object of the twins' affection during an interview.
Sunny works her way through The Renewal, and her first impression is fairly benign. A little kooky, but her client's daughter seems both happy and healthy. She reports this to her clients, then learns the daughter has disappeared from The Renewal residence. Vetting the usual suspects, Sunny moves her focus back to the cult, and things get pretty interesting at that point. Along the way, Parker shares Sunny's therapy session with Boston's Greatest Shrink, Susan Silverman. We always enjoy these interludes, as they provide a strictly empirical look at Susan, something we definitely don't get from the Spenser books. As she pokes into The Renewal, it will surprise no one that things aren't as benign as she once thought.
Don't wait too long for these two cases to intersect, because they don't. They simply give us the joy of watching Jesse and Sunny, together and apart, do what they do and then ruminate on it. Sound familiar? It should.
And that's the key to why Parker's books are so effective. He lets his characters tell the story. He puts them on the path, and then more or less gets out of the way.
Split Image moves the stories of both Jesse Stone and Sunny Randall, together and apart, forward. Parker weaves in the great supporting cast in Paradise, primarily Molly Crane and Suitcase Simpson, with his usual skill.
Basically, it's a story of what happens when a childhood psychosis is untreated, perhaps encouraged, and manifests itself in adult behavior. Parker excels at this kind of superficial examination (we're not interested in clinical, are we?) to tell his story, and it's the main strength of Split Image.
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52 of 55 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Fascinating Conflicts and Resolutions, March 13, 2010
"He also split the rock, and the waters gushed out." -- Isaiah 48:21
I held off starting this book until I had absorbed and become accustomed to the news of Robert B. Parker's passing. Rather than anticipating that there would be dozens more Parker novels coming soon, I realized that the time had come to more carefully examine and consider the last few novels in the editorial pipeline.
Split Image was a pleasant surprise for me in several dimensions. Although the cover refers to this as a Jesse Stone novel, there's quite a lot of Sunny Randall in the book, too, as she pursues a private investigation in Paradise, that well-known home and haunt for mobbed-up crooks and moral-appearing bad guys. Their interactions are rich in this series, and Split Image is one of the best books for bringing out the foundations for the mutual attractions and hurdles.
In addition, Mr. Parker has handled a sexually tinged story with much more deftness than he usually did in the past. Sometimes his novels seem to be more like exercises in voyeurism concerning the vulgar than they are stories about human sexuality in all of its dimensions.
To me the best police procedural and crime novels start with an unusual premise . . . and then play out in unexpected ways. Here the premise is one that I would never have come up with in a million years: Two mobsters who don't care that much for one another marry twins and live next door to one another in (where else?) Paradise.
In many police procedurals, you know exactly what to expect from the beginning. Mr. Parker rewards us with a plot that has more surprises to keep things interesting than we have any right to expect. I liked that.
In some of Mr. Parker's novels from recent years, the psychological element is so large in the book that you might feel like you are in a therapy session yourself rather than reading about crime, criminals, and the idealists (Don Quixote's in disguise) Mr. Parker likes to set after those who need punishment. In Split Image, that element adds to the story and doesn't weigh too heavily.
How would I characterize this story? Everything works together in a nice balance. If I hadn't read the book, I would have been skeptical that there was still a novel to be written about Jesse Stone that would be this satisfying.
Bravo, Mr. Parker! I'm sorry you aren't here to read this praise. I'm going to miss your amazing dialogue and your ability to craft unusual stories such as this one that leave me hungry for more.
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10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Pure Parker, March 27, 2010
We'll never know how Robert B. Parker intended to carry through in the continuing development of the Jesse Stone-Sunny Randall relationship, but at least we have this novel which, at the very least, holds out the promise they each can address their psychological roadblocks: Jesse's lingering love for his ex-wife and Sonny's prolonged infatuation with her former husband.
But more important, Parker wrote another fine mystery novel in his inimitable style. It is a pretty racy subject, involving a couple of murders and how two sex-crazy women, twins married to two gangsters, are involved. At the same time, Sonny takes on a cult to try to rescue a young woman.
Written with the same aplomb and pithy dialogue as all Parker novels, "Split Image" is at the same time amusing and full of surprises. Parker, of course, died recently, but he left behind some new books to be enjoyed, as well as a legacy of more than 50 novels, of which this is of equal quality, and highly recommended.
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