Sunny Randall, Lady P.I. and professional artist, or is that the other way around?, is hired by a Governor wannabe to find his runaway 15 year old daughter. With a little help from her friend Spike, who is as tough as he is gay, and he's very gay, and her ex-husband Richie, who is mob connected, Sunny finds the girl with little trouble. Returning her home is more of a problem though since Sunny is sure there is more to the girl's running away then she's being told; especially after some local muscle try to kill the girl and Sunny along with her.

Family Honor was much better then I thought it would be. When I heard Robert Parker was writing a novel with a female protagonist my first reaction was, "Oh my God no! A Susan Silverman clone is going to have her own series! Ugh!" I wasn't even close. There is a Susan Silverman clone in the novel, as Sunny's best friend, but, thank God, she plays a fairly minor role. The rest of the book is taken up by a refreshingly realistic female private detective who admits that sometimes, "It would be nice to be 200 pounds and be an ex-boxer." but who has her own style of toughness and manages to deal with the bad guys very nicely despite being pretty and petite. The supporting characters in the form of her psychotic sidekick (having one seems to be a requisite for being a detective in today's fiction) named Spike and her ex-husband Richie are well thought out. The sub-plot of Richie and Sunny's relationship is interesting in that she loves him and he loves her, but her family of cops trying to arrest his family of mobsters has put a crimp in there relationship. Like Spenser, Sunny has a dog, but hers is an ugly little mutt who at least serves some function in the book though why Parker's characters are so obsessed with their dogs would probably keep a shrink busy for years. Personally, I'm a cat person.

My biggest complaint with Family Honor is that Parker doesn't even try to pretend the entire book isn't recycled from one of his earlier Spenser novels, Early Autumn. Entire passages from that book appear to have been lifted, re-written slightly, and set down in Family Honor. That's not the worst thing that could've happened, if Parker chooses to plagerize himself he picked one of his best books to do so from, but an original story would have been a lot better; not to mention fairer to his fans.

An interesting sidenote is that Mr. Parker reportedly wrote this novel with the specific intent of his friend Helen Hunt playing the role of Sunny in a movie version of the novel. But whatever reason he wrote it Family Honor outshines a lot of Parker's more recent, and not as impressive work, and is worth reading.