Perish Twice (Sunny Randall Novels) (Hardcover)

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

What mystery fan hasn't heard by now that Robert B. Parker created his Sunny Randall series expressly for good friend Helen Hunt, with an eye toward the actress playing the petite blonde investigator on the silver screen? Although the series has been touted as a radical departure for Parker (a woman in the lead, by gum!), so strongly do Boston PI Sunny and her cohorts resemble Boston PI Spenser and his pals that the movie's casting director might prefer a blond-wigged Robert Urich. But Parker's quick quips, droll wit, and staccato dialogue are all on display in the latest Randall novel, Perish Twice, so in spite of the reworked characters, there's still plenty to enjoy.

When radical feminist Mary Lou Goddard hires Sunny to protect her from a stalker, Sunny accepts the case with some reluctance. After all, Goddard detests Rosie, Sunny's bull terrier, canine vacuum, and stakeout companion ("Rosie was in the passenger seat, staring out the side window, alert for the appearance of a strange dog at whom she could gargle ferociously."). It doesn't take Sunny long to track down and confront Lawrence Reeves, a particularly pestilential human being. But pestilence is no excuse for murder, so when Reeves and Gretchen Crane, one of Goddard's colleagues, are both found dead, Sunny dives into the murky waters of Boston's prostitution industry, where Reeves was a client and Gretchen was trying to unionize the workers. Politics and sexuality can be a nasty tangle, and the unraveling threads lead straight to mobster Tony Marcus's door. Tony may appreciate Sunny's sharp wit, but business is business: interference can--and does--lead to a bullet with her name on it. And as if all of this weren't enough, Sunny's sister and her best friend are in the throes of nasty divorces. Luckily, the leap from PI to marital counselor is well within Sunny's abilities.

While there's no doubt that rabid Parker fans will snap up anything the author turns out (and with reason), Perish Twice may be more appealing to new readers, for whom Sunny's charm will carry none of the uneasy echoes of private investigators past. --Kelly Flynn

From Publishers Weekly

Boston PI Sunny Randle, given her second outing here, is to Parker's veteran PI Spenser as Pepsi is to Coke: a bit lighter and sweeter, but still the real deal. And in the literary equivalent of a blind taste test, you'd be hard pressed to tell them apart; this second Sunny novel, even more than her first (Family Honor), is a Spenser book wearing a skirt. About now, the author's fans might be yearning for a change of pace of the sort Parker has offered in his stand-alones and his Jesse Stone series; still, what's here is quite good. The novel revolves around assorted couples' dysfunctional liaisons. In one significant subplot, Sunny's obnoxious and spoiled sister, Elizabeth, hires Sunny to trail her husband, whom she suspects of having an affair; when Sunny catches the lothario, Elizabeth leaves him and begins to sleep around. In another, Sunny's old therapist pal, Julie, is having troubles with her beloved and is also starting to date. And in the novel's main plotline, a lesbian activist who hires Sunny to protect her from a stalker also turns out to be stuck in a web of infidelityAand murder. Two killingsAa man Sunny pinpoints as the stalker, and a woman who works for the activistAeventually bring Sunny into the orbit of scary black gangster Tony Marcus, who runs prostitution in Boston. The scenes involving Sunny, Marcus and Marcus's underlings crackle with tension and sometimes violence; the rest of the novel presents a wholly absorbing puzzle of confused motives and whodunits that Sunny picks at as doggedly as any PI going. With its smooth blend of mystery, action and psychological probings, this is yet another first-rate, though not innovative, offering from a reliable old master. 15-city author tour. (Oct.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Putnam Adult; First Edition edition (October 2, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0399146687
• ISBN-13: 978-0399146688
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (67 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #754,237 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

• This is item 4 in The Sunny Randall Series.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

26 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Sunny's second outing has a lot of echoes, October 5, 2000

By	New World Smurf "new_world_smurf" (Richmond, Virginia) - See all my reviews

Robert Parker's newest character, Boston P.I. Sunny Randall, returns in "Perish Twice," but this time she's juggling the role of relationship counselor along with her usual sleuthing duties. Her snooty sister learns of her husband's mistress and plunges into bouts of self-pity mixed with revenge; her best friend, bored with her marriage, has an affair, and a lesbian feminist becomes increasingly unhelpful when it's revealed that her stalker might know her more intimately than she's willing to admit. Through it all, Sunny struggles with her own relationship with her ex-husband Richie and comes closer to danger with each new twist of her case.

It's still too early to tell where Parker will take the character of Sunny. At this point, she still seems like the female equivalent of Parker's most famous character, Spenser, albeit a bit more ladylike. The book itself is fairly typical, uninspired Parker--the plot is reminiscent of an early Spenser novel, "Looking For Rachel Wallace." Sunny's relationship with Richie echoes a similar situation with Parker's other character Jesse Stone. Parker fans will experience a lot of deja vu with "Perish Twice," but it's still a fairly enjoyable read.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Variations on a Theme, October 3, 2000

By	Charles R. Slater (Mount Kisco, New York United States) - See all my reviews

No, the title I've chosen does not refer to Robert Parker creating a sort of female Spenser in Sunny Randall. Rather this, Sunny's second case, is itself more a series of studies of the varied and tortured physical relations women get into. There's the radical feminist who's a lesbian with a heterosexual itch to scratch; the former prostitute who drifted from respectable married life to lesbian promiscuity; the unhappy wife who deserts her husband and children to find herself; and the overly dependent wife who discovers her husband is cheating and strikes out on her own, a role for which she is singularly unqualified. Then there's Sunny herself, enjoying a perfectly good relationship with the man she's divorced. Somewhere along the way, three people get murdered because of the dirty little complications in the first two relationships above. That the last two confused women are Sunny's best friend and sister adds to the intrigue. But it also adds to the confusion as Sunny hops from emotional problem to emotional problem while trying to solve a well disguised mystery, knowing solving it could also be fatal. It works, well sort of, only because of Parker's genius with sparse prose and clipped, incisive dialogue. And because the heroine is so damn likeable. Still, it's not fully satisyfing and, as he did in Hugger Mugger, Mr. Parker's ending is also unsatisfyingly unresolved. Parhaps as he grows older, Mr. Parker is trying to tell us that the black and white of the young Spenser's world hardly exists. If that's the message, it doesn't quite work. Sort of like this novel.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Parker just doesn't get Females, October 10, 2000

By	Lisa Shea "LisaShea.com" - See all my reviews (TOP 10 REVIEWER)

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I *love* the Spenser series and love Parker's writing style in general. That makes it very difficult for me to understand how he can fail in his two Sunny Randall stories. The first one was pretty bad. If possible, this one is even worse.

Sunny is a short blonde PI whose ex-hubby's family are into crime. She has a female shrink pal (a la Susan), a tough male friend (a la Hawk) and just about the same contacts as Spenser does. I could forgive all that. It's the way Parker writes female characters that really irks me, and the inane plots he puts her through.

Let's see. In the first chapter Sunny's sister is berating crazy Jew shrinks (hmmmmmm) and she manages to catch the sis' hubby cheating the very first day, the very first time. Not only that, but plot flaws give her omniscient powers at times. We can forgive those, perhaps they were sly comments on womanhood and the Spenser history.

Sunny finds it strange that a woman who is researching prostitutes would talk to a vice cop. We have the whole "Oh, I love you but I can't live with you, isn't this perfect" situation. We have the old "I caught you and now must decide what is morally correct to do about it" situation. This starts to get tedious.

Two of the women she deals with need men in different ways - one to take care of her and one for pleasure. Another doesn't like her home situation and decides to run around with men instead. Sunny doesn't want to turn to men, but in the end ends up completely turning to men to both get to talk to someone and then to fall in their arms and cry afterwards! For a book that you would hope promotes a female's ability to be an individual, it falls flat on its face.

The plot had so much potential. There were mixed sexualities, mixed races, mixed relationships, you name it. I kept hoping for something to shine through, but it didn't. Sunny kept telling everyone that they were in a 'crazy time' and that they shouldn't do anything permanent until they got through it. I can only hope that Parker will concentrate on Spenser from now on, and give us the fantastic writing he is so well known for.