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Family Honor
by Robert Parker

Robert Parker has done it again, but this time the shoe's on the other foot. Instead of aging tough guy ex-cop Spencer and his psychiatrist girl friend with a dog, we get tough girl ex-cop Sunny Randall and her mafia ex-husband. With a dog. For some odd reason their marriage just didn't work out. Something about her being a cop and him coming from a criminal family never quite jibed for them and come to think of it, it does seem a little implausible.

As usual, Parker's dialog is fluent, sometimes funny, and the book is soon half gone. There are plenty of cute situations, but the repartee doesn't ring quite true from the mouth of a babe.

The quick-moving plot shares the same problem with the kind of violence that plagues television melodrama: a dire focus on cataclysmic events that basically just don't usually happen in anyone's real life. Sunny relies on the pragmatic use of deadly force applied by the men in her life for a lot of her problem solving, but she does the shrink thing pretty well with the 15-year-old runaway she's been hired to find and return.

Also, Parker asks us to believe outrageous and actually silly things about a Republican candidate for governor of Massachusetts and his wife, and dishes out more than a dollop of by-the-book knee-jerk feminism: you end of wishing that Spencer and Susan and Hawk were back.

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