Bookies!

After a nice round dozen books following Daniel Leary and Adele Mundy in their adventures with the Royal Cinnabar Navy, David Drake takes a side-step with To Clear Away the Shadows. While staying in the same universe, he introduces a new pair of characters to follow, Harry Harper and Rick Grenville. The pair are serving aboard an RCN exploratory vessel, The Far Traveler, which is searching long-settled but relatively isolated worlds that might hold clues to a previous species called the "Archaic Spacefarers."

The new move has mixed results although it's an overall positive at this point. Drake had hit a few ruts with his Leary-Mundy series, such as trying to find yet another way to describe how Adele's servant Tovera was basically a sociopath with an inexplicable loyalty to her employer. As the Alliance and Cinnabar settled into a sort of cold war with each other, Daniel and Adele had only so many opportunities to mix in with small-scale conflicts that could restart major hostilities if they didn't handle things right. So fresh characters and a fresh setting offer a chance to leave the ruts before they deepen too far. Harry and Rick are engaging characters, albeit a little too callow in more than one instance. And the supporting cast in The Far Traveler has their own interesting features and provides more characters with actual agency and agendas than the main sequence series has featured.

On the other hand, Shadows seems much more like a handful of loosely-connected but separate stories than a single-thread plot, and the seams show more than is good for them. They would be better served by either being even more separate, as Drake's first set of Hammer's Slammers space mercenary stories were, or more unified in narrative structure. Shadows offers reason enough to hope that Drake decides to travel with Harry and Rick again, but shows clear room -- and need -- for improvement.

-----

This space's hopes for Blood Feud, the initial outing of Mike Lupica writing Robert B. Parker's female private detective Sunny Randall, were not high. Parker had created Sunny during a time when his own skills seemed to be more typing than writing, leaving the Randall cast predictable and a little lifeless when compared to his better Spenser work. He'd left Sunny in 2007, connected to Paradise police chief Jesse Stone (another Parker series), but subsequent Stone authors evicted her from that storyline and she floated in limbo. At the time, my opinion was that I'd never read anything by Lupica that made me think he should write a book, let alone be one of the people continuing a Parker series.

Which makes the fair-to-middling success of Feud a pleasant surprise. Sunny's ex-husband Richie Burke has divorced his second wife, so the pair find themselves connected every now and again when they are of a mind to be. Then Richie is shot. Though he survives, Sunny takes it personally and starts digging into the attack. But then another gunman kills Richie's uncle, and both Sunny and Richie's Irish mob family starting upping the pressure on people to provide information to stop a potential war. Ex-cop Sunny isn't happy with the Burkes' lawless tactics, and the Burkes aren't happy with the information Sunny starts to uncover. She may wind up targeted by the people she's trying to help.

Lupica gives Sunny some of the Parker trademark smart-assery and in some cases improves on his efforts. Other Parker continuations have a range of successes -- Ace Atkins has a good handle on Spenser, Michael Brandman and Reed Farrell Coleman have both largely whiffed on Jesse Stone and Robert Knott clearly has no idea what he's doing with Virgil Cole and Everett Hitch. Lupica actually develops Sunny as a character, giving her an arc of growth as she digs into the past of her former in-laws and tries to sort out some of her own personal issues in therapy. Sure, once Parker established the character he didn't do squat with her, so any movement is good. But Feud does more than just the minimum and puts more effort into its story and character growth than Parker did in all six of the Sunny Randall books he wrote.

Plenty of Parker fans would buy whatever came out with his name on the cover (and Coleman and Knott, especially, have been building a mountain of evidence bearing that out). So Lupica didn't have to try. But he did, and even if Blood Feud doesn't hit Parker's peak levels it's better than it had to be and it's good enough to give him a second outing.