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Robert B. Parker's Payback

por Mike Lupica

Séries: Sunny Randall (9)

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864311,226 (3.53)2
Fiction. Mystery. Suspense. Thriller. HTML:In her latest thrilling adventure, PI Sunny Randall takes on two serpentine cases that converge into one deadly mystery.
PI Sunny Randall has often relied on the help of her best friend Spike in times of need. When Spike's restaurant is taken over under a predatory loan agreement, Sunny has a chance to return the favor. She begins digging into the life of the hedge fund manager who screwed Spike over - surely a guy that smarmy has a skeleton or two in his closet - and soon finds this new enemy may have the backing of even badder criminals.
At the same time, Sunny's cop contact Lee Farrell asks her to intervene with his niece, a college student who reported being the victim of a crime but seems to know more than she's telling police. As the uncooperative young woman becomes outright hostile, Sunny runs up against a wall that she's only more determined to scale.
Then, what appear to be two disparate cases are united by a common factor, and the picture becomes even more muddled. But one thing is clear: Sunny has been poking a hornet's nest from two sides, and all hell is about to break loose.
… (mais)
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Synopsis: 'PI Sunny Randall has often relied on the help of her best friend Spike in times of need. When Spike's restaurant is taken over under a predatory loan agreement, Sunny has a chance to return the favor. She begins digging into the life of the hedge fund manager who screwed Spike over — surely a guy that smarmy has a skeleton or two in his closet — and soon finds this new enemy may have the backing of even badder criminals.

At the same time, Sunny's cop contact Lee Farrell asks her to intervene with his niece, a college student who reported being the victim of a crime but seems to know more than she's telling police. As the uncooperative young woman becomes outright hostile, Sunny runs up against a wall that she's only more determined to scale.

Then, what appear to be two disparate cases are united by a common factor, and the picture becomes even more muddled. But one thing is clear: Sunny has been poking a hornet's nest from two sides, and all hell is about to break loose.' From the author's website.
  DrLed | Dec 29, 2023 |
Robert B. Parker’s estate designated Mike Lupica to continue writing about Sunny Randall, one of Parker’s most beloved characters. Payback is Lupica’s third book in Parker’s tradition. Lupica pays homage to Parker in using just about every one of his favorite characters (other than Spenser and Hawk) to concoct a convoluted, sassy story beginning with Sunny’s friend Spike’s losing his restaurant to a rapacious money lender, branching into the world of high stakes poker, money laundering, and the Russian mob, with two murders thrown in for good measure. In the end, it’s a little tough to figure why Sunny is still pursuing an investigation that risks her life once her friend Spike has regained his restaurant.

No matter. In Parker’s books, the murders (there usually was at least one murder) were only an excuse for his clever characters to engage in snappy dialog and perspicacious analysis, ofter only tangentially concerned with the murders. This book is no exception, and Lupica does a creditable imitation of the master.

I listened to the audio version of the book, and the reader, Kate Burton, does an excellent job of changing voices to fit the character and is especially good at Russian accents.

(JAB) ( )
  nbmars | Sep 16, 2021 |
With Lupica now writing both the Sunny Randall and the Jesse Stone series, the crossovers were expected. He gets both characters' voices quite well but the writing is still nowhere near Parker's.

This is the first novel in any of the series I am reading that deals with the post-COVID world. The timing is a bit wonky - the novel is supposedly set in October (2020?), with the pandemic sounding as being all but done and it sounds like it lasted longer than this timeline will allow for but it is fiction so that can be ignored - for all I know, it can be 2021 :)

With the pandemic raging, Spike was about to lose his restaurant so he accepted the help of a friend - signing papers he should not have. So now, with the world reopening and the restaurant finally getting back to normal, he finds himself in a big trouble - according to those papers, he does not own his restaurant anymore. So he asks Sunny for help - not that is is clear what she can do but if there is something to be done, she probably can do it.

Meanwhile, Lee Farrell's niece is beaten up and refuses to talk to anyone about it. So Lee asks Sunny to talk to her. And not very unexpectedly before long the two cases turn out to be connected - and Sunny manages to annoy yet another big group of gangsters - the Russian Mob (or parts of it anyway) and to tangle with the world of high stakes poker. Having a few bodies to deal with just makes her even less likely to drop the case - even when everyone she loves gets threatened.

In his attempt to ground the series in the shared universe, Lupica ends up with too many secondary characters - some show up for a chapter or two (Tony Marcus, the producer from LA who Sunny dated earlier), some are part of the story (Susan, Belson, Rita Fiore, Phil Randall, Lee Farrell, Jesse Stone (who also goes away for a bit), all the still living Burkes) , some are just name checked (Molly Crane in a memory, Vinnie is in Miami, Brian Lundquist checks some fingerprints without making an appearance, even Gino is mentioned a few times). It also feels like a checklist that needs to be covered - and even with the ones who make it to the story, it sometimes felt as if they were there just because they had to be.

And then there is Lupuca's style - he is still too worried to go for long dialogs so he will break them up by using "he said, I said" in non dialog form. Parker's novels were subtly using current events to make them current but without making them dated within a few years. Lupica's current events comparisons will date this one very quickly.

Despite the style issues, I actually enjoyed the book. The story works and I like the shared universe. The books are getting a bit formulaic but sometimes that's exactly what one needs. Don't start here if you had never read the Sunny novels but if you had read them (and the Spencer and Jesse Stone ones), this one will feel like an old friend. ( )
  AnnieMod | Jul 27, 2021 |
This originally appeared at The Irresponsible Reader.
---
WHAT'S PAYBACK ABOUT?
Sunny's closest friend, Spike, has got himself in trouble—he needed some financial assistance to keep the doors of his restaurant open (like just about every restaurant in 2020) and let a long-time customer and friend, a hedge fund manager, loan him the money. But when Spike tried to pay off the loan, he learned the hard way that Alex Drysdale wasn't so much a friend as he was an opportunistic toad, and thanks to clever work on the contract, Spike had defaulted on the loan almost immediately.

Spike has already let his fists do the talking (and broken Drysdale's nose), but oddly enough, that didn't help. So, Sunny decides she's going to figure out a way to get Drysdale to release him. Financial crimes aren't really Sunny's forte—much less shady, but not criminal, financial deals—but Spike is family and she figures she can learn as she goes.

She's barely begun digging into Drysdale and his practices when she gets a call from Lee Farrell who needs a favor. His niece, a student at Taft*, was assaulted and she refuses to talk to the police or Lee. Can Sunny help? Sunny tries to talk to her, but Emily keeps saying it was just a misunderstanding and refuses to explain anything. Lee's worried about her, Sunny's concerned and nosy. So while Lee deals with a major homicide investigation, Sunny starts digging into Emily's life.

* Yup, Taft, the Parker-verse's all-purpose university for people who don't go to Harvard.

Before Sunny can really get anywhere with the Drysdale investigation, she's warned off. THat warning quickly becomes direct threats against her, Spike, Richie's son, and her father. You have to admit, that's really not the most clever approach. Sunny warns them all to be careful and works harder to find something. One of the biggest things she finds is a link between the two cases.

AHH, A LITTLE COVID FICTION
Early on, we're told that this starts shortly after the pandemic is over and life has gone back to something akin to normal. But vaguely so, especially when this was written, no one had an idea when exactly this would be, so Lupica left things vague.

Also, Spike's is in trouble because of the impact that COVID has had on restaurants.

I lost count of how many times that Sunny talked about the world falling apart and getting worse. Clearly, this is a product of 2020 (and 2021). I remember hearing and reading authors last year talking about not being sure how to address COVID in their works—if they were even going to. This is probably the best way to do it—acknowledge it happened, look at the changes/difficulties it brought about—and don't get into the details.

POOR LEE FARRELL
This is my biggest beef with the novel—and the more that I think about it, the more it bothers me.

So, Lee's got a big case that he's dealing with and a family member in trouble—and he's still not in the book that much. Belson plays a bigger role than Lee does in the book, which is fine because it's not like Belson gets a lot of use in the Atkins novels, and he shouldn't be put out to pasture. But this was a chance for Lee to get to shine and Lupica let it pass by.

I like Lee, and have since Paper Doll (he was one of the few good things in that novel), but Parker never used him all that much—and Lupica does the same. It's time for Lee Farrell to really get a moment.

SUNNY AND THE MEN IN HER LIFE
There are two other things that Lupica inherited from Parker that he's maintained—but I'd like him to move on. From Family Honor on, there's been this tension between Sunny's independence, being able to make it as a female in a male-dominated world/industry and her being dependent on men like Richie and Spike (and a couple of others) to help out when things get dangerous. I can see revisiting the issue from time to time, but the authors have spent so much time on it, the reader has to wonder—why doesn't Sunny do something about it? Either step up her fitness and martial arts training, or partner up with a female who can handle the shooting and hand-to-hand stuff. They exist.

Similarly is her seemingly everlasting tie to Richie, being unable to let him go—even as it's clear she needs to, for at least his son's sake. Her level of commitment to Jesse Stone could use some definition as well, but that's not going to happen as long as Richie's around (and, I'm not sure Jesse's capable of it). Coleman was able to get Jesse to the point where he was able to let go of Jen (a move that was more overdue than Sunny and Jesse). I'd like to see Sunny do something similar, all that therapy she's received should be enabling her to make some tough choices.

All that said, again, these are inherited themes, ideas, and characteristics. I'm not holding them against Lupica for maintaining it (he can only do so much without getting the fans to rebel). I just think it'd be nice to see.

SO, WHAT DID I THINK ABOUT PAYBACK?
Lupica is locked-in on this series, he's got a handle on the characters and the stories he wants to tell and gets it done confidently, smoothly, and with just enough flair to keep the reader hooked and turning pages. This was his best yet. I'd describe his first two novels in this series as "good, for a Sunny Randall novel." Payback. is doesn't get the modifier. It's good, period.

* I've got both hardcovers on the shelf next to me, after getting the eARCs from NetGalley. So if that sounds a little more back-handed than I mean that to be, maybe the fact that I shelled out for them takes a bit of the sting out of it.

The prose is crisp. It's engaging and filled with a Parker-esque clarity and wit. The story is compelling and an interesting reaction to things in the zeitgeist, and the characters are as solidly drawn and executed as they were over two decades ago when Sunny debuted. New readers or established Sunny fans alike will find enough to entertain them and will likely come back for more—just like me. I recommend Payback to you. ( )
  hcnewton | Apr 20, 2021 |
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Fiction. Mystery. Suspense. Thriller. HTML:In her latest thrilling adventure, PI Sunny Randall takes on two serpentine cases that converge into one deadly mystery.
PI Sunny Randall has often relied on the help of her best friend Spike in times of need. When Spike's restaurant is taken over under a predatory loan agreement, Sunny has a chance to return the favor. She begins digging into the life of the hedge fund manager who screwed Spike over - surely a guy that smarmy has a skeleton or two in his closet - and soon finds this new enemy may have the backing of even badder criminals.
At the same time, Sunny's cop contact Lee Farrell asks her to intervene with his niece, a college student who reported being the victim of a crime but seems to know more than she's telling police. As the uncooperative young woman becomes outright hostile, Sunny runs up against a wall that she's only more determined to scale.
Then, what appear to be two disparate cases are united by a common factor, and the picture becomes even more muddled. But one thing is clear: Sunny has been poking a hornet's nest from two sides, and all hell is about to break loose.

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