Book Review
Blue Screen
By ROBERT PARKER Reviewed by PEGGY BARNETT
Robert Parker is the author of over 50 books. Although his style is easy to recognize, it's not as though "if you've read one, you've read them all." He lives in Boston, and many of his novels take place there. He adds humor to the suspense, a quality that his readers have come to expect.

Spencer, one of his primary characters, is a private detective who has prospered over the years and books now takes only those cases that he chooses to. Sunny Randall, a more recent addition to his cast, is younger, less experienced, and less free to be choosey. In Blue Screen, she finds herself the protector of a beautiful athlete who is self-absorbed and very hard to get along with.

Sunny is tougher than she looks (she's a beauty, too), but needs help before she is through. Parker lets her meet another of his characters (whom you may have seen on TV), Jesse Stone, chief of police in Paradise, Massachusetts. They work the case together, and we can hear strains of romantic music growing in the background. There is an element of filmdom here, since Buddy Bollen, who hires Sunny, is a minor movie mogul.

Parker knows and likes dogs, and Rosie, Sunny's miniature English bull terrier, is a delight. "Rosie opened her beady black eyes for a moment and looked at me and closed them again and returned to the long thoughts she surely was thinking." Rosie has many long thoughts.

The dialog in a Robert Parker book is fun. "'Is it my business?' I said. 'No.' I smiled and shook my head. 'So many things aren't,' I said."

Unlike some writers, Parker does not feel compelled to give lengthy descriptions. When they appear, they are usually for a purpose: "The lawyer was bulky and red-faced with a lot of silver-gray hair brushed straight back. He had on a doublebreasted gray glen plaid suit, a red tie, and a blue shirt with a white collar. He had a briefcase with him, so we'd know he was a lawyer."

To add further to the fun, Sunny is seeing a psychiatrist named Susan Silverman. Silverman just happens to be Spencer's girlfriend, and only readers in the know get to enjoy the joke.

Blue Screen is a typical Robert Parker suspense story, engaging and "a good read." It is available at the Mary Willis Library.

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