Okay, so I’m biased.  I admit it.  I’m one of the late Robert B. Parker’s biggest fans.

I haven’t read anywhere near all his books and only venture off into them about twice a year when I want to go to a place that feels like home, a world where people talk in short sentences and leave most things unsaid.

If you haven’t read Robert B. Parker, do yourself a favor and find one of his books.

I finished Blue Screen a few days ago.  It’s the sort of book a slow reader like me can read cover to cover in a few hours, mainly because most of the book is white space, the blank part of the pages not filled up with words.

Parker created all that empty space by describing a scene for a paragraph or two then plunging the reader into characters’ conversations.  The dialogue does not consist of long harangues, but in snappy, terse interactions.

Blue Screen is a Sunny Randall book, the first I’ve read.  Sunny Randall the heroine is a hard-nosed female private investigator, a looker who packs plenty of wallop in a small frame.

As an added benefit of Blue Screen, Sunny works the case with Chief Jesse Stone of the Paradise, Massachusetts, PD.  The Jesse Stone character is known far and wide now as a result of the made for TV movies starring Tom Selleck.  Those movies predated Blue Bloods and are a harbinger of the character he plays there.

Blue Screen is the story of the investigation into the murder of the sister of a movie  star, a celebrity Sunny Randall has been hired to protect.  As the investigation unfolds, we learn the bizarre connections between the dead woman and the rest of the cast of characters, connections that demonstrate the only plot that is really worth a damn, i.e., things are not as they appear.

Sunny Randall and Jesse Stone also develop their own unique brand of relationship with each other, one tinged with past fears, loaded with psychological baggage, playful, seductive and powerful.

If you want a few hours of respite from the real world, take the plunge and pick up a copy of Blue Screen.