First person, opposite gender

Some of my favorite reading when it comes to adult novels is female detective fiction. I mean specifically those novels that are narrated by a woman who earns her living as a private detective. Sara Paretsky is my favorite. I think she writes smart, literary mysteries that also have a lot of action and suspense.

Those are hard shoes to fill. Nevertheless I'm always scouting for more.

Robert B. Parker, who's known for his Spenser mysteries, started writing a female detective series several years ago. I just stumbled on to it. It's in first person. The character is fairly believable, although the narrator's voice doesn't engage me.

There's nothing particularly off about the first-person narrator. But I couldn't stop remembering that "Sunny" was really Parker in disguise. For one thing his author photo fills the back cover.

Sunny describes herself as a feminist. Interesting then that this single, childless woman gets involved with taking care of a teenage runaway/missing person in the first book of the series. I wonder why Parker put her in a mommy role for the first novel in this series. And why, at the climax, when bad guys are chasing her in their Lexus, does Parker send Sunny running to a restaurant filled with men to defend her?

This seems similar to having adults solve the problems in a children's novel.

I'm constantly amazed at how differently men and women think about things. If you know your characters well enough, I suppose it shouldn't matter if you're writing from the opposite gender. And if you grew up with siblings of the opposite gender and/or have kids, maybe that's enough to give you insight.

There's an awful lot of ways you can mess that up.