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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN num: 9780425177068
ISBN number: 0425177068
Label: Berkley
Manufacturer: Berkley
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 338
Printing Date: November 01, 2000
Publishing house: Berkley
Release Date: November 07, 2000
Sale Popularity Level: 143255
Studio: Berkley
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Editor's Notes and Comments:
Product Description:
The author of the bestselling Spenser novels introduces a heroine unlike any other-private eye Sunny Randall. She's street-smart, sexy, and suddenly thrown into a Boston mob war where high-stakes politics and low-down killers conspire to make Sunny's very first case her last.
'Robert B. Parker has another winner...Sunny can hold her own with Spenser.'-Boston Globe 'Sharp and funny.' -Washington Post
'Sleek and seductive...one of the best.'-Publishing houses Weekly
Amazon.com Review:
Let's get this settled right away: Sunny Randall is nothing like Spenser. True, she's a private eye in Boston with good connections to the cops, and she also knows a lot of bad guys. And yes, she happens to have a trusty sidekick named Spike, and a close friend who could easily be related to Susan Silverman, (Spenser's long-term companion). Oh, did I mention the cute dog? Aside from that, though, there's absolutely no similarity between this new series from Robert B. Parker and his long-running Spenser books. Just because the case Sunny is working on--finding a missing 15-year-old girl who has run away from her very rich parents--sounds similar to the Spenser favorite Thin Air doesn't mean Parker is repeating himself here. Think of it as more like a homage, the kind of thing the author took on when he agreed to finish Raymond Chandler's Poodle Springs. Only in this case it's a homage to himself--but what the hell.
Written specifically with Parker's good friend actress Helen Hunt in mind, Family Honor is all in good fun. At one point, a no-nonsense nun looks down at Sunny's bull terrier, who is lying on her back begging for a tummy rub. 'What's wrong with this dog?' Sister said. 'It is a dog, isn't it?'
Parker is so good that with one hand tied behind his back he can create characters that are more memorable than most writers can even when pounding away with both fists. In just a few short pages, he tells us all about Sunny's career as a painter--and about the complicated relationship between her cool policeman father and her irritating pseudo-feminist mother. Parker even makes a direct dig at Spenser (who, before turning to private investigating, had a short and fairly unsuccessful career in the boxing world). When the runaway girl questions Sunny's ability to protect her from dangerous criminals--'you're a girl like me, for crissake, what are you going to do?'--Sunny replies, 'It would be nice if I weighed two hundred pounds and used to be a boxer. But I'm not, so we find other ways.' Exactly. --Dick Adler
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Rated by buyers 
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Being a huge Spenser fan I am of course a Robert B. Parker fan. Sunny Randall makes her debut in this yarn of sex, deceit and extortion. Not his best but getting his feet wet with this new female perspective, he makes more than a solid effort. (he gets the ball rolling in following tales) I'm grateful to Mr. Parker and his pen (figuratively???) If you are a fan...don't miss it. If you're not...WHY not???!!!!
Rated by buyers 
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FAMILY HONOR lived up to its title as the pilot for this delightful series which felt at very first like Spenser was toning himself into a female roar heard round the literary arena, while extending his slant on gangster Vs cop family backgrounds (in which neither is all bad or all good) in this Juliet and Romeo romance.
I hadn't thought I'd be able to get into a female private eye series by Parker, especially after having become addicted to his 34 Spenser novels. But FAMILY HONOR was a perfect appetizer with appealing percolation. I don't doubt that Parker can carry both his new series (see my review of NIGHT PASSAGE, Jesse Stone # 1).
It didn't take more than a few chapters for Sunny to split off from the long-wrought, well-writ Spenser mystique and into her own, as a full character... maybe with Spenser speaking into her ear as an angel from an alternate reality, for a while. I enjoyed the slips connecting to Spenser, i.e., how Sunny might deal with a particular hairy situation if she were a 200 pound, male boxer. In humorous yet realistic contrast to Spenser and Hawk types, Parker dramatized what a small female can do to compensate for not being a testy, taut, towering gorilla-with-gonads, in a plot which will had me smiling. I'm excited about this series; I enjoyed the upbeat feeling of this very first offering in it. I relished hearing Randall use Spenser's trademark words in dialogue, like "some more" and "eek."
Reading the very first few chapters of FAMILY HONOR I kept seeing Spenser in high heels, noting how uncomfortable they were, and wondering where/how to effectively house a big enough gun on a 115 lb, 5'4" body... as he seemed to be having great fun adapting to this recent female incarnation, shaking out the form and personality. Of course, that image alone got me grinning. By the time the intense ending called up, I was liking Sunny Randall every bit as much as Kinsey Millhone (Sue Grafton's P. I.).
For this unique pilot, Parker designed a stylish, italicized prologue in third person observation of Sunny and Rosie, accomplishing an artistic, literary feel, giving a light-touch, sensitive contrast to chapter one opening into a very first person narrative style with Sunny telling her own story in the classic private eye genre mode.
The included cultural icons of cooking, dress, habits, and thinking were precisely on target with the copyright date of 1999, when the Great Chefs TV episodes were running hot and heavy, with their long-handled saute pans being shook (contents were no longer stirred on TV) above gas-lit burners on commercial grade stoves, featuring Spike, Sunny's gay, tough-guy chef friend.
The plot here gave hints of EARLY AUTUMN (# 7 Spenser) and CEREMONY (# 9 Spenser) as Sunny took in a young teen, Millicent Patton, runaway, hooking daughter of her clients. Enlightening entertainment was easily obtained through Sunny's ways of dealing with and drawing out this young human lost in the sump and shrug of a lack of love.
A few quirky questions came to mind as I began reading this novel:
What might Rachel Wallace (# 6 SPENSER, Looking for Rachel Wallace) say about Spenser's (Parker's) ability to understand being female, if she were to read FAMILY HONOR. And what would she think about macho if she had read all 34 Spenser novels. Can novels help us understand that which we would have to stretch outside our bodies and into another form to get? I'd say they can, especially if penned by Parker.
Rachel Wallace may have to give the gauntlet on this one. Spenser understands.
Yet... can testosterone ever fully comprehend powerlessness...
Maybe any person who has ever been depressed, grieved loss of a loved one, or desperately wanted something he couldn't have, for whatever reason, has the capacity to comprehend the initial feeling of hopelessness which sometimes comes at those times of leached strength and slow coming answers. We each have a spirit, though, which seems to believe that morning comes daily. Parker has made a good case that sunny weather can dog the footsteps of storms.
Linda Shelnutt
Rated by buyers 
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This is the very first book I have read by Robert B. Parker so I cannot compare his newly minted heroine, Sunny Randall, to his previous protagonists or previous books.
Sonja "Sunny" Randall is a 35-year-old chip off the old block. Like her father, she was a cop, but then left to become a private detective. She's tough and beautiful, but frankly there is little about her disposition that seems to evoke her nickname. She's actually a rather abrupt individual who is a little too much of a smart alec to be truly endearing. Her wit is clever, but often a bit abrasive and she prefers witty one liners to deep thought. After a while, the one-liners become tiresome and seem to be mostly a way for Sunny to cover up her own issues with a fiesty shell. She's a loner - in fact, it's what led her to leave the police department for private practice, and it's a large part of what led her to divorce her husband of 9 years, Richie, with whom she remains good friends. Her constant companion is Rosie, a miniature bull terrier who Sunny seems to like much better than most people, particularly children.
The plot of this book centers around Millicent Patton, the 15-year-old daughter of a wealthy Boston banker and his socialite wife. When Millie runs away from home, Sunny is hired by Millie's parents to find her and bring her back home. It isn't long before Sunny catches up with Mille, but when she finds out what drove Millie out of the house in the very first place, she has a decision to make: should she return Millie to her parents or not? The plot weaves the lives of Millie, Millie's parents, and Sunny directly into the middle of Boston's organized crime, and what starts out as finding a runaway teen ends up being an elusive contest to keep them both from getting killed.
I still haven't decided if I really like Sunny Randall. She's just a little too fearless and flippant for my tastes. Also, Parker's writing style is rather terse. He seems to prefer language that spurts rather than flows, with prose that is often truncated. In fact, I don't think I've ever read a novel in which so many sentences had less than 10 words in them. It's OK for periodic busts of dialog, but as a steady diet in narrative and dialog, it isn't really my cup of tea. I often found myself feeling as though two or three sentences should have been joined by commas or some other punctuation besides periods.
There isn't generally a whole lot of suspense here, as Parker reveals the answers slowly throughout the book rather than taking us breathlessly to the final few pages for the climax and resolution.
Although it's nice to have discovered a new author in this genre, I'm not sure I can count him among my favorites. I will say this: he certainly beats James Patterson, but that isn't saying a whole lot these days with Patterson churning out mediocre books like a drive through window.
If I were to award a letter grade, I'd give this book a B-. I'd also recommend starting with this book since it is the very first in the Sunny Randall series, and the other books sort of build chronologically with many of the same characters appearing over and over again, such as Sunny's friend Spike, her ex-husband Ritchie, her sister Elizabeth, and her friend Julie, not to mention several repeat appearances by member's of Boston's underworld. If you like this book, continue on in the Sunny Randall series. If not, you'll probably want to pick something else since I'm now on my 3rd Sunny Randall book and have found the style of each to be essentially the same.
Rated by buyers -
If you thought Parker was good, you don't know how good he is until you read this one. The confrontation in the restaurant is the best scene I have read in a mystery. Hold your breath!
Rated by buyers -
Family Honor by Robert B. Parker is the very first in his Sunny Randall series, and like all of Parker's books, it's sharp, witty and entertaining.
Sunny Randall is a young and pretty cop-turned-private eye who is just getting over a divorce. Her former husband, Richie Burke, comes from a Boston mob family. Although they still love each other, the cop-mob conflict got in the way (Sunny's cop father kept trying to put Richie's father in jail). Sunny is hired by a prominent Boston couple whose 15 year old daughter has run away. The father has political aspirations but when Sunny starts digging, it turns out that the daughter has many reasons to not wish to return home. Sunny finds herself in the middle of a mob war that involves the Italian Mafia trying to move in on the Irish Mob.
I don't think that anyone writes dialogue as sharp as Parker. Sunny is actually a female Spenser, and while Spenser has one sidekick (Hawk), Sunny is surrounded by a host of oddball characters. In addition to Richie, there is Spike (her gay bodybuilding friend), her therapist/friend Julie and her dog, Rosie. Sunny needs the assistant of all her friends while trying to solve this mystery and stay alive at the same time.
As a Spenser fan, I'm not sure how close Parker comes to the sucess of his Spenser series with Sunny Randall. However, I definitely plan to read more.
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