Blue Screen

By: Robert B. Parker

Narrated by: Kate Burton

Length: 6 hrs and 10 mins

Publisher's summary

Buddy Bollen is a C-list movie mogul who made his fortune producing films of questionable artistic merit. When Buddy hires Sunny Randall to protect his rising star and girlfriend, Erin Flint, Sunny knows from the start that the prickly, spoiled beauty won't make her job easy. And when Erin's sister, Misty, is found dead in the lavish home they share with sugar daddy Bollen, there doesn't seem to be a single lead worth pursuing.

But then Sunny meets Jesse Stone, chief of police in Paradise, Massachusetts, under whose jurisdiction the case falls. It immediately becomes clear that Jesse and Sunny have much in common. While searching for the killer, they learn an awful lot about each other, and themselves.

Tracking Misty's murderer reveals a host of seedy complications behind Erin's glamorous lifestyle as well as Buddy Bollen's entertainment empire, made up of shady film deals and mobsters out for revenge. But in a world where there's little difference between the good guys and the bad, exposing the killer could prove to be Sunny's undoing.

©2006 Robert B. Parker (P)2006 Random House, Inc. Random House Audio, a division of Random House, Inc.

Critic reviews

"[A] breezy, fast-paced whodunit." (Publishers Weekly)

love it!

Great Book. I love all of Robert B. Parkers books. this is no exception. wonderful story.

Wonderful Listen

I've read every book Robert B. Parker has ever written, many of them in audio form. I've actually learned to ENJOY the "he said" and "she said" simplicity of the dialogue, because I can filter that out and focus on WHAT they said. My favorite part of these books is the smart characters with their dry, understated humor. Put two or three of them in the same story, and I'm in heaven. Parker has had cross-overs before of characters from one book series to another, but combining Sunny Randall and Jesse Stone is a great combination. Add Susan Silverman into the mix as the shrink, and it feels like some of my favorite friends all attending a reunion together.

Good story, but not great as audible

This is classic Parker, sparsely written, irreverent characters and the usual more complicated than expected plot. The reader, Kate Burton does a fine job as Sunny Randall, one of Parker's three popular protagonists. Unfortunately Parker's sparse style that serves so well in print really makes the audible version hard to listen to. Parker uses "he said" or "I said" constantly in print because he leverages dialogue as the primary means to move the story along instead of reams of dreck filler. When the reader says "he said" for the 100th time in an hour, she and you are both exhausted by the discontinuity it creates. Parker's novels work well as video, particularly with the departed Robert Urich as Spenser or Tom Selleck as Jesse Stone (albeit older than the character in the books) because the dialogue is the story. The audible format doesn't work so well.

Robert B Parker special

Blue Screen scrolls by quickly for the listening but offers a great story and an exciting new character.

Not Spencer

I was disappointed in this Parker novel. After enjoying the Spencer series I expected more. I felt that the characters were poorly developed (did the recovering alcoholic have any problem with the tall scotch and soda he was sipping?) and the ending contrived.

He said, she said Jesse said, I said

way too much of he said she said Jesse said, I said. The narrator couldn't do voices to distinguish characters and those words took over the narrative. Not really a Jesse Stone story.