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Shrink Rap by Robert B. Parker Rating: •• (Mildly Recommended)
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Therapeutic Master mystery writer Robert B. Parker begins his latest Sunny Randall novel, Shrink Rap, with the private eye taking on a new client, a writer, whose ex-husband and former psychiatrist, is stalking her. Parker fans continue to learn more about Sunny in this novel, and her own psyche goes through some therapy as part of her efforts to protect her client. Sunny begins to understand more about her ongoing relationship with her ex-husband Richie, while getting to the bottom of the relationship between client Melanie Joan Hall and her former husband, John Melvin. Over the course of almost three hundred pages of short chapters and scenes, Parker takes Sunny and readers on a predictable course toward resolving the mystery, with too much unlikely and unbelievable action along the way. Here’s an excerpt from the beginning of Chapter 5: “ ‘Do you actually think of yourself as Melanie Joan?’ I said. We were sitting at the bar off the lobby in the Stouffer’s Tower Plaza on Public Square in Cleveland. ‘Melanie Joan is part of the public persona,’ Melanie Joan said. ‘Like the big hair and the tight dress.’ It was quarter to ten at night. We were drinking cosmopolitans. The bar was quiet. It was nearly full but it opened onto the lobby and the vast high arch of the lobby tended to absorb noise. ‘When he watched me get dressed for a signing or something,’ Melanie Joan said, ‘my first husband would call it “putting on Melanie Joan Hall.” When I’m alone, I suppose, I’m probably still a little girl named Joanie.’ I smiled and sipped my cosmopolitan. I looked at it with the translucence from behind the bar shining through it. Mostly I drink them because they look so pretty.” Parker tries hard to deliver a credible female narrator through Sunny Randall, and she’s somewhat more complex a character than his other protagonists, Spenser or Jesse Stone. Despite Parker’s movement toward complexity, his female voice lacks the reality that a woman mystery writer like Sue Grafton provides effortlessly. The effort Parker attempts in Shrink Rap shows, and Parker fans will put up with it, while awaiting another Spenser book. If you’re willing to overlook Parker’s male clumsiness, go ahead and give Shrink Rap some attention. Steve Hopkins, October 16, 2002
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