Robert B. Parker's Blood Feud by Mike Lupica

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I have written before about the continuation of series by other authors, but I still have mixed feelings about it. Mike Lupica has taken on Robert B. Parker's least successful heroine, Sunny Randall, and given her back to Richie Burke, in time to solve a crime no one wants her to solve.

Sunny Randall is basically Spencer in a skirt -- she has no relationship with her mother, only her father, and no women friends, only her ex-husband and her extremely macho gay best friend. And her dog(s), of course. I appreciate Parker's nods to diversity, but he cannot write a believable women character. Lupica wisely doesn't try to make the character more three dimensional -- he is, after all, being paid to recreate her -- and he does a good job with tone, phrasing, and the well known characters. He's clearly read all the mystery series, and sticks to the little he knows about Boston, Providence, and points in between so there are no glaring geographical errors, but no deep knowledge of the city, which was a Parker hallmark. The plot is good, and so is the pacing, so you keep turning the pages, which is a big part of the point, and you may not be able to guess the ending. In that sense, the book is a success, and actually better than the few books where Randall was dating Jesse Stone, hero of yet another Parker series.


My favorite part was the snarky political humor; it made me wonder how many novelists are using the backdrop of the current political scene in the US, and what they are saying. Sounds like a graduate school thesis for 2025.

If you are a fan, you will enjoy this one, too. If you have not read a lot of Robert Parker, I would go back to the early Spencer books, beginning with Mortal Stakes or Looking for Rachel Wallace.



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