First of all, check out the link to the right for What's On My Bookshelf. This site lets you trade books using a simple point system. The more books you register and send off the more points you get and the more books you can request. You pay for the postage to send the book to someone who has requested it and in return, when you request a book it shows up in your mailbox with no postage due-makes the day feel a bit like Christmas! Credit to my daughter for showing me this site.

Today, I wanted to share an author that I actually found while watching TV. I'm a fan of murder mysteries on screen as well as in print and several years ago I started watching the Spenser for Hire series. I was disappointed when the series ended but one day I stumbled over Robert B Parker and was thrilled to find all the same characters and the same tone.

Parker took a detour and started a new series inhabited by Sunny Randall who also lives in Boston. If you're a dog lover, like me, you'll love the idea of a private detective combined with her black and white, miniature, English bull terrier, Rosie. Parker has inhabited Sunny's world with a cast of characters who give the series very much the same "feel" as the Spenser books. The dialogue is witty and intelligent, the plots are suspenseful, and the characters are eccentric.

I have two Sunny Randall books sitting in front of me-not recent reads but I will be registering them on What's On My Bookshelf and I thought I'd share them with you first. They are Shrink Rap and Melancholy Baby. In Shrink Rap Sunny is hired to protect a woman from her ex-husband who is a shrink. To get some leverage on him Sunny decides to become his patient. Not only is he a stalker it turns out he's a good shrink and she discovers the beginning of some hard truths about herself. In Melancholy Baby Spenser's Boston and Sunny's Boston intersect in the form of Dr. Silverman who is also a shrink and Spenser's significant other. Sunny's ex-husband is getting remarried and she needs to sort out her emotions. She obviously can't continue with the stalker!

Before I sign off for today, I want to tell you about one more series that Parker has created. This is the Jesse Stone series. A couple of them have been made into movies starring Tom Selleck. It's worth checking out from your local DVD store as well as getting them in print. Parker is obviously savvy enough to maintain control over content when he agrees to allow his books to be filmed. The problem with books with continuing characters is that the author simply can't write them fast enough and eventually they end. Fortunately, Parker has created these three different, satisfying series.