Robert B. Parker’s Bad Influence – A Sunny Randall Novel by Alison Gaylin. If you’re familiar with the late, great Robert B. Parker’s Boston, you’ll know Sunny Randall. She’s a former cop who now works as a private investigator in Boston. She has had an on again off again relationship with Jesse Stone, a nearby smalltown police chief and another Parker character. Her therapist is Dr. Susan Silverman, girlfriend to Parker’s legendary Spenser character.
Like the Hardy Boys, who remained teenagers from 1927 to 2005, Randall is ageless. She should be about 70, but in the books, she’s around 40. She misses her ex-husband, Richie, who is the son of a local Irish mobster.
As this book opens, Sunny is with her friend, Spike, a gay ex-cop who owns a local restaurant. Business has been way off, so Spike has brought in a pair of hot social media influencers, Blake and Alena. True to form, they take pouting selfies with their drinks and, as if by magic, the bar fills up with paying customers. Spike is stunned, offering profuse thanks to Bethany Rose, the influencers’ manager.
All is not right for Bethany, however, as she tells Sunny that someone is threatening Blake. He needs protection, and someone needs to get to the bottom of what’s going on with him.
Sunny takes the assignment and finds herself immersed in the strange world of social media stars. She’s not totally unaware of how it works, but she’s thrown off by the lucrative insincerity of it all—the jarring way that this good-looking young couple who “have it all” also seem so stressed out.
In addition to threatening text messages, someone broke into Blake’s apartment and left a photo taken of him sleeping. Whoever it is, they’re getting into his head and his personal living space. Sunny and Spike interrogate Blake’s luxury building doorman and get almost nowhere, but they learn enough to start peeling back the layers of secrecy that Blake has built around his true identity.
Alena is worried about Blake, but oddly detached, for a girlfriend. Sunny wonders what’s going on, and you’ll never believe what’s really happening between the two of them. Blake has an oddly urgent attachment to his manager, Bethany, which Sunny can’t figure out. Are they lovers? Before she can dig any deeper, Bethany disappears, throwing Blake into a tailspin as the threats against him escalate.
Sunny has her work cut out for her, and her own safety is at risk as she plunges into a digital abyss with some real-life bullets being fired in her direction. Without getting into spoiler territory, I’ll share that Blake’s secrets lead Sunny into contact with the Boston mob world, where she has a tiny bit of standing due to her ex-father-in-law.
Here, we get Parker’s special sauce, the cozy relationships between Boston mobsters and cop. The Spenser and Jesse Stone novels feature these moments, too. A cop or a civilian gets a pleasant sit down with a major mob figure who has some sense of honor. The mobster helps out. I find these scenes terribly hard to believe, but it’s a fantasy, so should I care? And, with Whitey Bulger having a brother in the Massachusetts Senate, maybe it’s more real than I know. In this book, these relationships are integral to the plot.
As for Alison Gaylin, she does a very fine job of bringing a Sunny Randall story to life. I suspect that writing these books is a lot harder than it looks. Gaylin has to balance the needs of the character and the series (and the ghost of parker, who died in 2010, for his many fans) with the basic requirement that she deliver a compelling, suspenseful mystery. She does all of these things, adding her own insights into the inner life of a woman nearing middle age.
Gaylin also does well with the social media influencer side of the story. This was challenging, I imagine. It would have been easy to slip into parody, but she avoids easy gags. Blake and Alena come across as real human beings selling their better than human images. It makes for interesting reading.