"Lupica makes smart-mouthed Sunny as fully realized as Parker’s better-known gumshoe, Spenser. Readers are sure to look forward to her next outing."—*Publishers Weekly
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"Lupica powers his way through the plot in fast-talking Parker style, reveling in the banter and the nicely delineated relationships between Sunny and various other Parker players....It's all smart-alecky good fun in the hard-boiled tradition."—*Booklist

Autorentext

Mike Lupica is a prominent sports journalist and the New York Times-bestselling author of more than forty works of fiction and non-fiction. A longtime friend to Robert B. Parker, he was selected by the Parker estate to continue the Sunny Randall and Jesse Stone series.

Kate Burton has appeared in such films as August and Life with Mikey. Her theater work includes Broadway appearances in Doonesbury and the revival of Stephen Sondhein's Company. She has previously read Running with the Demon, Crooked Little Heart, and Intensity for Random House AudioBooks.

Klappentext

Street-wise and sassy PI Sunny Randall returns in the latest Robert B. Parker novel by Mike Lupica.

PI Sunny Randall has often relied on her best friend, Spike, in times of need. Now their roles are reversed. His 20-year old niece, a junior at Taft University, has committed suicide, and Spike wants to know why. The search will send them digging into the life of a girl embroiled in secrets of her own, her sorority, the university, and even in Spike's own family . . . secrets that will eventually put both Sunny and Spike in more danger than they've ever faced.

Zusammenfassung
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.

Leseprobe
 
   ONE
 
I was in my brand new office over the P.F. Chang’s at Park Plaza, around the corner from the Four Seasons and a block from the Public Garden, feeling almost as cool as Tina Fey.
     I’d just walked through the door that had “Sunny Randall Investigations” written on the outside, put on some coffee, sat down behind my rustic wood Pottery Barn desk. All in all, I was everything a professional woman should be, if you didn’t count the Glock in the top righthand drawer of my desk.
     There were two chairs on the client side of the desk, a small couch against one wall, and a table on the other side of the room that I used for painting when I needed to take a break from world-class detecting. It housed my pads and boards and a palette and all the other tools of a world-class water colorist’s trade.
     “Forget about the gun,” Jesse Stone said. “If somebody shows up and threatens you, just pull a paint brush on them.”
     “What about the boxing classes you made me take?” I said. “You should see how good my right hand has gotten.”
     I had signed up for a half-dozen at the gym an old boxer named Henry Cimoli owned over near the harbor.
     “Here’s hoping you never need to throw it,” he said.
     Jesse. Chief of Police, Paradise, Massachusetts. On-again, off-again boyfriend. Mostly on over the past year. I had given in and started calling him that, my boyfriend, just because I hadn’t found a better way to describe his role in my life. We were still together, anyway, even though we were mostly apart, our relationship having survived the virus. We were official, as the kids liked to say, even if we hadn’t announced it on Instagram, or wherever kids announced such things these days, in a world where they found everything that happened to them completely fascinating. Jesse and I had been as close as we’d ever been before the virus caused the world to collapse on itself. Now we’d once again grown more used to our own social distancing, and for longer and longer periods of time, him up in Paradise, me in Boston.
     But still official, at least in our own unofficial way.
“I feel like Jesse and I are happy,” I said to Spike the night before, over drinks at Spike’s.
“Low bar,” he said. “For both of you.”
“Come on,” I said. “I’ve got a stress-free relationship going, money in the bank, my own office, I’ve still got Rosie the dog, I’ve even lost five pounds, not that you seem to have noticed.”
“Just like a big girl,” Spike said.
“Not as big as I was five pounds ago,” I said.
“You also still have ex-husband issues,” he said, referring to Richie Burke, still in Boston, still in my life as he raised his son from his second marriage.
“Do not,” I said.
     “Do so,” Spike said.
     “You sound childish,” I said.
     “Do not,” he said. “Do not, do not, do not.”
Spike and I had been celebrating the fact that I’d finally gotten paid by Robert Magowan, who owned the second-biggest insurance company in Boston. Magowan had hired me to prove that his wife had been cheating on him. This I did, well over two months ago. Then he refused to pay, and kept refusing, until Spike and I had finally shown up at his office and Spike threatened to shut a drawer with Magowan’s head inside it. That was right before I handed Mr. Magowan my phone and showed him the images of him in bed in a suite at the Four Seasons, park view, with Lurleen from accounting, and wondered out loud who’d win the race to the divorce lawyers, him or the missus, once the missus got a load of what I thought were some very artsy photographs.
“You were only supposed to follow her,” he said.
“Well,” I said, “to put it in language you can understand, I thought I might need additional coverage.”
He’d proceeded to transfer the money over speaker phone from an LA branch of Wells Fargo while Spike and I watched and listened.
On our way out of the office Magowan had said to me, “They told me you were a ballbreaker.”
“Not like Lurleen,” Spike had said.
I knew I could have handled Magowan myself. I’d brought Spike along just for fun. His, mostly. He’d gone through a bad time during the pandemic, nearly having lost Spike’s at the worst of it. But he’d come up with the money he needed at the last minute, thanks to a loan from one of his best customers, a young hedge fund guy named Alex Drysdale, who spent almost as much time in the place as I did.
Spike still w…