Melancholy Baby - Softcover

Robert B Parker

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1843444380 ISBN 13: 9781843444381

Publisher: NO EXIT PRESS, 2015

Synopsis

Melancholy Baby

About this title

Review:

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

Review:

No one can rival Parker at his best, and this is pretty near as good as it gets. (Yorkshire Post)

Praise for Family Honor:

Lean and fast (The Guardian)

I fell in love with his books (Helen Hunt)

Parker packs more meaning into a whispered "yeah" than most writers can pack into a page. (The Sunday Times)

Compact, percussive storytelling by a writer who knows his job and does it to the letter (Literary Review)

The writing and characters are a delight. (Sunday Times)

Sleek, ingenious, well-muscled entertainment. (Literary Review)

About this edition

• Publisher: NO EXIT PRESS
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1843444380
• ISBN 13: 9781843444381
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 192