Review #3: Hard Core Twenty-Four, by Janet Evanovich

Simon Diggery is FTA, so Stephanie goes to get him, and he happily goes along with her. Simon's usually an issue, so when he's willing to go to jail and hang out there for a while, Stephanie can't resist asking why. Turns out, there are zombies on the loose, which Simon discovered while grave robbing. Which, okay, but Stephanie's not interested in zombie hunting because it's scary, and besides, she's too busy taking care of Ethel, Simon's pet boa, while Simon is in the clink. 

But then Morelli catches a case involving a body with a missing brain, and then Grandma offers up the information that brains and heads have gone missing from the funeral home, and then Diesel shows back up, and, well, Stephanie needs to maybe deal with the zombie thing.

In the meantime, Grandma has met a George Hamilton lookalike online, and he invites Grandma down to visit him in Key West. So she runs away, Connie finds out that George looks more like the Costanza version than the Hamilton version, he's married, and he and his wife are swingers. So in the midst of zombie hunting, Stephanie has to go rescue Grandma and bring her back while Mrs. Plum eyes her ironing board. Also, Diesel is crashing at Stephanie's, Stephanie is staying at Morelli's, and Rex is having a sleepover at Ranger's. It's good to be Rex.

It's typical Stephanie Plum - wacky highjincks and lots of food (I don't understand why Stephanie doesn't weigh 500 pounds) and crazy outfits from Lula and some car explosions. And speaking of, for the first time ever, Ranger threatens to exact payment for a new car: a night with him. Stephanie knows she is going to blow up this car. Ranger knows she is going to blow up this car. EVERYONE knows she is going to blow up this car. So she double or nothings him, and sure enough, she blows up the second one. (Well, one of them didn't explode, but some road kill exploded inside, so...same thing.) Anyway, Ranger, in a throwaway line but one that I found very interesting, tells Stephanie, in response to her query about whether he's going to collect on their bet, that she is driving this bus, and she alone makes those decisions. It's made very clear that Stephanie is going to have to make the move. 

Which brings up a whole other discussion, and one that we've had before, about whether it's time for Stephanie to grow up and make a choice. And for awhile, I thought she was moving in that direction; she and Joe were sort of engaged to be engaged during the last book. But with this Ranger bet, I'm not so sure. And I wonder if Janet's trying to tell us something with Diesel back in the mix, although Stephanie pointedly stays at Joe's while Diesel is there. I vacillate over how to feel about Stephanie and her inability to make a decision, and whether Joe is a sucker for staying with her, and whether Stephanie is a jerk for treating Joe the way she does, and whether Ranger is just a player. But then I realize that maybe I'm giving too much though to fictional characters and their romantic lives. Plus also: Team Ranger 4-eva, so I have to kind of suspend my moral outrage in order to keep reading about him.

Conspicuously missing from this installment were Stephanie's dad, her cousin Eddie Gazarra, Vinnie, Grandma Bella, and Joyce Barnhart. And Tank, whom I love dearly. And even though Valerie and Albert Kloughn and their pack of weird kids haven't been around in several years, I miss them, too. Connie and Lula weren't as prominent and even though the men were around, they were definitely not the focus. Stephanie did a lot on her own this time around, which is a bit of a departure, and it was kind of nice to see. 

I'll keep reading these as long as Janet churns them out. I mean: Ranger. Duh.

Review #49: The Pursuit: A Fox and O'Hare novel, by Janet Evanovich & Lee Goldberg

Do you remember that show on USA called White Collar with Matt Bomer where he was an art thief who worked with the FBI but still kind of ran scams on the side? That's kind of the premise of Janet Evanovich's Fox and O'Hare series, but instead of sexy Matt Bomer, we get sexy Nick Fox, and instead of semi-boring Peter we get Special Agent Kate O'Hare. And instead of catching art thieves and staying stateside, Evanovich and Goldberg (who wrote for the TV show Monk), take Kate and Nick all over the world. 

The Pursuit, which is the fifth book in the series, begins in Hawaii, where Nick has disappeared. He's been kidnapped and is being pressed in to service by Dragan Kovic, a murderous ex-Serbian military officer who has no qualms about offing members of his team. Kate needs to rescue him, but she knows if she causes an international incident, and with Nick it's an international incident, the FBI won't be there to back her up. So she calls in her dad Jake, a former military man who still has connections all over the world, as her wingman, and sets out to find Nick. The chase takes her all through Europe and in to the sewer system of France, which yes, is as gross as you'd think, but also a little bit fascinating, too.

One of Evanovich's greatest strengths is writing fantastic supporting characters, and all of the old favorites are here in this one as well as some new characters that I wouldn't be surprised to see again. And in this series, she's using them sparingly, just enough to bring in some humor, and then they're gone again. One of the issues I've been having with the Stephanie Plum novels is that the support staff - Lula and Connie and Grandma and Vinnie - all feel a little bit schticky and tired, and that feeling is successfully avoided with the series, at least so far. And this series is a little more serious than Stephanie; these are real crimes with real-world implications, and perhaps it's Goldberg's influence that brings a darker tone to these books.

I'm don't think I've read all five of these and I might have to go back to the beginning. They're quick, easy beach reads, perfect for when you jut want to check out for a bit.

Review #48: Curious Minds: A Knight and Moon Novel, by Janet Evanovich

I wanted to like this. I really, really, really did. But I couldn't. Mom and Aunt both loved it, said it was laugh out loud funny, that Janet had finally come back after kind of veering off there with Stephanie and Ranger and Joe awhile ago. But I just didn't love it. I don't even think I really liked it.

Sutton (who co-writes the Lizzy and Diesel series) and Evanovich's new series - because it's of course going to be a series - is about Riley Moon, a junior analyst at the mega bank of Blane-Grunwald. She's Harvard-educated, and the blurb says that her "aggressive Texas spitfire attitude" helped her land the job, which she just started as the novel opens. She's thrilled with the new job, although she isn't sure about her first assignment: babysit billionaire werido Emerson Knight, who is insisting that the bank show him the family gold. But she figures it's no problem - she'll take him to the bank, show him the gold, and that will be that.

Except there are shenanigans afoot at Blane-Grunwald and the gold is "unavailable for viewing". In the quest to find the Knight family gold, Riley and Emerson uncover an Dr. Evil-like plot with the bank stealing the gold of other countries and attempting to devalue the dollar, somehow allowing the head Grunwald to take over the world. There are also explosions, a dead body, some visits to Area 51 (cause everyone knows that there are no aliens out there, just gold), and a few wild animals running loose on the Knight estate. 

So here are some of my many beefs with the book. First of all, I never got the feeling that Riley was an "aggressive spitfire". She was kind of mamby-pamby, as my mother would say. Which I recognize isn't a real word, but I'm sure you can figure out what she means. I mean, she could shoot a gun and could think her way out of a situation, but she never really gelled as the character I either wanted her to be or Janet envisioned. Secondly, Emerson was supposed to be eccentric, but what he really was was an amalgamation of several different eccentricities and none of them added up. It was like Evanvoich just looked up eccentric characteristics on line and picked a few unrelated ones. I think he was supposed to be charmingly weird, but instead he was just...weird. Thirdly, I didn't really understand the whole devalue-the-dollar-take-over-the-world plot. Maybe that's cause I don't really get how money works, beyond the basic plot points of knowing that I need it, my kid spends it, and I never seem to have enough of it. Do other countries really have piles of gold bars in reserve? And do they really keep them locked in the basement storage vaults of an American bank? That seems...ill-advised. It feels like a lot could go wrong there. 

But I think my biggest issue was that there was just no heat between Riley and Emerson. All of Evanovich's duos have a spark, witty repartee, or some sort of chemistry. All of them. And Riley and Emerson were, quite frankly, about as sexy as Nancy Drew and Ned Nickerson. I mean, if Ned Nickerson had pet zebras and a fast car. And was less of a stick-in-the-mud. And less boring. I kind of never liked Ned. Anyway, Stephanie and Ranger and Morelli all have fantastic chemistry. Kate and Nick from the Fox and O'Hare series have great snarky comments back and forth. And even Lizzy and Diesel are hot, especially when he just appears the way he does. But Riley and Emerson did nothing for me. Nada. Zip. Zilch.

When I made the blah face to Mom about this one, she reminded me that One for the Money wasn't all that great right out of the gate, which makes me want to go back and read it again and reevaluate. And maybe this is Janet's set up to what will eventually be a good series. I'll give it one more go for the next one, but she's got to ratchet up the snark and heat and humor. And tone down the twee expressions that Riley uses. ("Crap on a cracker"? Um, no.)

Also? They're doing the James Patterson thing where the font gets bigger, the chapters get shorter, and still charging $21.95 for a hardback. This is not a $21.95 book.

Review #34: Body Movers, by Stephanie Bond

I downloaded Body Movers as an audio book to keep me company on my commute because sometimes I think that all I do is drive, and there's only so much NPR I can listen to during election season without wanting to tear my hair out. Body Movers seemed like it would be a darkly funny little diversion but it was... not. It was actually almost sort of painfully dull.

Carlotta Wren works in the couture department of Neiman Marcus in the Atlanta mall. Her younger brother, Wesley, is nineteen and in trouble for hacking in to the Atlanta police department's database. The police department thinks Wesley was fixing a traffic ticket; in reality he was looking for information about his parents, because Mom and Dad disappeared in the middle of a trial (for... extortion? embezzlement? something like that...) when Carlotta was just nineteen, leaving her behind to raise Wesley. Wesley becomes involved with Coop, the local body mover (I guess the coroner doesn't do that any more?) and Carlotta goes with him on a call to remove the body of Angela Ashford, who just so happens to have tried to strangle Carlotta earlier in the day after accusing her of having an affair with Angela's husband Peter, who was engaged to Carlotta a million years ago but broke it off after her parents ran away. So now Peter (the husband) is suspected of the murder, Coop has the hots for Carlotta but it's weird cause he works with her brother (who, by the way, has a gambling problem), and it's also weird because in his spare time he builds miniatures in cigar boxes (like...dioramas, I guess?), Peter wants Carlotta back after all these years, even though he's on the hook for Angela's death, and oh, by the way, the cop who is investigating the murder has the hots for Carlotta, too. And it turns out that Angela was a high dollar hooker and that's why she was killed.

So there's a lot going on.

I think that Body Movers (and the subsequent series) was supposed to be kind of a like a coroner's version of Stephanie Plum, but it just wasn't funny. Janet Evanovich, for all that she's been kind of phoning it in lately, can still write mad-cap adventures and wacky highjinks. Body Movers was just too dull and too serious, and Carlotta had about as much personality as a wet dishrag. I couldn't understand why she had three men chasing after her. Peter Ashford made sense, because he was pretty dishrag-esque, too, but Coop and the detective had potential for so much more. I wanted to reach in to the book and pull them out and give them better material.

There are (at least) seven of these in the series; I have no desire to read any of the others. I'd rather listen to the news again.

Review #24: Dark Places, by Gillian Flynn

I read Gone Girl a couple of years ago and while at the time I thought it was okay, the farther I get from it, the less I like it. It was a runaway hit, as we all know, but it just didn't quite live up to the hype for me. So when I found a copy of Dark Places at the local library book shop, I figured I would give Gillian another shot. But just like Gone Girl, she lost me at the ending, and now I think that Gillian and I have to break up for good.

Spoilers ahead. Like, I'm going to talk about the ending in detail, so don't read further if you don't want to know.

For those who haven't read it, Dark Places is the story of Libby Day, the sole survivor of a family massacre in Kinnakee, Kansas. Libby was the youngest of four children, and famously testified against her brother, Ben, fingering him as the killer of her mother and two older sisters. After the murders, Libby bounced around from family member to family member, and now, 25 years later, she is broke and alone. The funds that were donated all those years ago have dried up, and Libby can't work; the killings understandably wrecked her, and there are days she can barely leave her bedroom, let alone hold down a job. She still sleeps with the lights on. Desperate for money, she agrees to meet with some crime enthusiasts for a fee. The members of The Kill Club, as they are known, think that Ben is innocent, and that Libby was coerced in to her testimony, and soon she begins to question whether her accusations all those years ago was really the truth.

Flashing back to the day of the murders, Libby recounts the events that led up to the destruction of her family. Ben, listening to "satanic rock" and dyeing his hair black, Libby's mother, so beaten down by her ex-husband and the poverty that comes with running a farm in the early 80s that she can't bear to discipline him, Libby herself, playing with her sisters, knowing that something is wrong when their aunt Diane arrives, carrying with her rumors that Ben has been accused of molesting a girl at school. By the time Diane arrives, Ben is nowhere to be found; Libby is dragged along with her mother and aunt in a frantic search to find him. By the next morning, Libby's mother and two sisters are dead.

Twenty five years later, after Libby's investigations with the help of a really weird guy from The Kill Club, we finally discover the truth. And the truth is, as they say, stranger than fiction. Ben didn't kill his mother; a serial killer nicknamed the Angel of Debt did, for a fee that was paid for by Libby's own mother. This is a woman who so loved her children that she was willing to protect her son from child molestation accusations, and yet she contracted for her own death because they couldn't make ends meet? That doesn't seem like character continuity to me. And at the very same time that the Angel of Debt is in the house killing Mrs. Day, Ben and his girlfriend Diondra come home, and Diondra stabs Ben's sister (because...I'm not sure? Diondra's just a bad person? It's never really explained), spraying blood everywhere. And then the Angel of Debt realizes that another sister witnessed his killing of Mrs. Day, so he has to kill her, too, but somehow Diondra and Ben escape, but not till after Diondra paints the walls with blood. And we're supposed to just believe all that? That's an awful lot of coincidences, and I nearly threw the book across the room at that point.

But Gillian wasn't done with her WTFery. Because, you see, Diondra was pregnant with Ben's baby while she was killing his sister and dancing in her blood. After Ben was arrested and sent to prison, Diondra skipped town and had a daughter named Crystal. And since Diondra is a total bananapants crazy person, Crystal grew up with her mom telling her the fairy tale of her imprisoned father and her murderess mother, and since Crystal is also a total bananapants crazy person, Crystal thought the whole my-mom-got-away-with-murder-and-let-my-father-rot-in-jail-for-it thing was OMG so cool, so when Libby finally tracked her niece down and asked to meet her, not knowing that Diondra and Crystal were freaking nut jobs, Crystal was so overcome with joy at meeting a new member of the family that she tried to kill Libby. And that's when I actually threw the book across the room. 

I'm all for unreliable narrators. I'm all for a few gory details, too, even if I do skim them sometimes cause I think they're too icky. And who doesn't love a good twist or two? But you have to make it believable, and that's where Flynn struggles. She paints herself in to a corner and can't figure out how to get out of it, so instead of rewriting or choosing a different path, she picks the most absurd ending she can possibly come up with, and it feels manipulative. And frankly, it takes me out of the story and ruins the book for me.

The only character in this entire book who was even slightly likable was the freaking Angel of Debt, because at least he felt a little bit of remorse over being forced to kill a little girl. When I can't even muster up some sympathy for the kid who had her entire family massacred, then we've got problems.

Review #7: Descent, by Tim Johnston

Boss read Descent about a year ago and praised it quite a bit, but I dismissed it because the way he described it didn't really hold my interest. He gave me the basic premise and just kept telling me that it was good, but I wasn't in the market for a mystery or a thriller, and so I shrugged it off as we tend to not always have the same taste in books. But then I was at Barnes & Noble recently, and nothing else was really doing it for me, so I thought I'd give it a shot.

And boy, was it worth it. 

Descent is the story of the Courtland family - husband Grant, wife Angela, and children Caitlin and Sean - who are in the Rocky Mountains for a last family vacation before Caitlin leaves for college. Caitlin is a championship runner, and early one morning she goes for a long run in the mountain with Sean trailing on his bike. Shortly afterwards, Grant gets a call that Sean has been found injured on the side of the road. Caitlin is nowhere to be found. Immediately the search party goes out, but she is gone.

Caitlin's disappearance tears in to the fabric of the family in countless ways. Grant refuses to leave Colorado, and eventually, the sheriff installs him in the guest house on his father's ranch, although the reader is never quite sure whether Grant is supposed to be caring for the invalid father, or whether the father is supposed to be keeping an eye on Grant. After recovering from his injuries, Sean leaves school and winds up hitchhiking back and forth across the country, going dark for months before surfacing again to his father, and then taking off again. And Angela, back home at her sister's while Grant remains in California, lets go of reality a little bit more every day. 

Johnston's writing is tense and powerful, both in the heart-racing moments and in the quiet afterwards of the destruction that gets played out over and over again on the page, and more than once I found myself letting out a breath I didn't know I was holding. The word gut-wrenching can be used to describe more than a handful of scenes, and it would have been easy to overdo that, but Johnston plays it exactly perfectly, This is a raw and emotional novel. If I have one quibble, it's this: SPOILER - I didn't love the way he redeemed the no-good brother of the sheriff, but I'm also not sure what else he could have done with those scenes. 

“One speck of difference in the far green sameness and he would stare so hard his vision would slur and his heart would surge and he would have to force himself to look away—Daddy, she’d said—and he would take his skull in his hands and clench his teeth until he felt the roots giving way and the world would pitch and he would groan like some aggrieved beast and believe he would retch up his guts, organs and entrails and heart and all, all of it wet and gray and steaming at his feet and go ahead, he would say into this blackness, go ahead god damn you.” 

Read this. But don't go running in the mountains any time soon.

Review #46: The Cutting Season, by Alicia Locke

In The Cutting Season, we meet Caren Gray, a young single mother working as the manager of a crumbling Louisiana antebellum plantation that's been turned in to a wedding and banquet facility. She and her nine year old daughter live on the property, spending their days in the same buildings where Caren's mother once worked as a cook, and where her three times great grandfather was a slave. The plantation sits up against a sugar cane field, and when one of the cane workers is found in the slave quarters with her throat slit, Caren no longer feels at home at Belle Vie.

As the police investigation circles in on one of Caren's employees, Caren's own investigation circles in on the owners of the plantation, the Clancy family, and the sugar company next door. With the help of an intrepid journalist, Caren begins to uncover more than she ever expected, including a new mystery: what happened to Belle Vie's runaway slave, who just so happens to be Caren's great grandfather.

The mysteries themselves aren't that difficult to solve, but they aren't really the point of the novel. Locke uses them as a way to explore race relations, the class system that still exists in this country, and the way that the South often tries to soften the edges of its sometimes brutal history. I love books set in the South, but very few of them - or at least very few of the ones I've read - have explored the uglier side of the region, and even fewer explore it from the point of view of someone who is affected by those uglier sides. And, too, this book is an interesting look at the way that race relations aren't always about the black/white divide. There is a larger statement in here about the way we treat immigrants, both legal and illegal, and this book makes me realize that the days of us welcoming the huddled masses are probably over for good. 

When Dennis Lehane chooses your novel as the first one he publishes under his new imprint, you've got to make sure you get it right. Attica Locke certainly did. This is her second novel; her first is on my TBR list. 

Review #36: The Last Child

This came to me from JB, who has an affinity for coming-of-age stories, and although this mystery certainly doesn't seem like one on the surface, I can't think of a better way to categorize it.

A year ago, twelve year old Alyssa Merrimon disappeared, seen being pulled in to a van by Jack Cross, the son of a local policeman. Alyssa's father, feeling responsible for the disappearance because he was late picking her up, runs off shortly afterward. Alyssa's mother, unable to cope with the disappearance of her daughter and the subsequent abandonment by her husband, turns inward, relying on booze and pills to get her through the day, making her very easy prey for a manipulative and abusive former boyfriend. And Alyssa's twin brother Johnny is left to desperately hold the pieces of his family together and bring his sister home.

Convinced that Alyssa is still alive, Johnny scours the county for her, stalking the registered sex offenders, determined to find her. Running parallel to Johnny is Detective Clyde Hunt, the lead detective on Alyssa's case. Johnny's gotten under Hyde's skin - the whole family has, really - but he's no closer to finding Alyssa than Johnny is.

Then, on the anniversary of Alyssa's kidnapping, another girl goes missing, and Johnny's actions set off a chain of events that will change countless lives.

I can't stress enough how much I enjoyed this book, and more than that, how well crafted it was. Mystery novels are often described as "chilling" or "gripping" or "shocking" or having "edge of your seat drama". All of those phrases seem trite, but they are absolutely accurate in regard to The Last Child. Johnny's story grabbed me from the beginning and didn't let go, and as the novel wore on, the faster I read it, both frantic to get to the next page and reluctant to reach the end. It's extraordinarily rare to find a mystery novel that keeps the reader guessing until the very end, and even more so to find one that so skillfully introduces a B story that surprises the reader as well. Hunt's characters are well drawn, and Johnny - described by one reviewer as "an amalgam of Opie Taylor and Scout Finch with a hint of Huck Finn" (Raleigh News & Observer) - is a boy who will stay with me for a long time to come. This is easily one of my favorite books of the year.

Review #6: The Chase, by Janet Evanovich & Lee Goldberg

Oh, Janet. I love you. I love your slightly control freak women who don't exactly have a handle on their lives, your devilishly handsome men who like to live in the grey area of morality, and most especially, the wacky hijinks you cook up.

The Chase picks up where The Heist left off, with FBI Special Agent Kate O'Hare and master criminal Nick Fox (get it with the names?) secretly teaming up to recover a Chinese artifact that has gone missing. See, the Chinese loaned the US a bronze rooster awhile ago, and a rich Chinese guy wanted it back. Sure, no problem, except the rooster's a fake; the real one was stolen years ago. Nick hatches a plan, but you know what they say about best laid plans. Shenanigans ensue, and some of the old B characters come back for a cameo. My favorites are Kate's dad, a former Army Ranger (or something like that) who lives in his other daughter's garage, but can still, at 60+, save the day in a helicopter with a knife strapped to his thigh, and Wilma, a blowsy broad who can drive, pilot, fly, or steer just about anything.

This isn't a particularly challenging book, the mystery isn't a deep psychological thriller, but sometimes I don't want that. Sometimes, I want to read to escape, and Janet lets me do that when she takes me in to her weird, wacky worlds. Plus, also, Nick is kind of hot, so that helps. (Not Ranger hot - because nobody is - but I wouldn't kick him out of bed, and sometimes a girl needs to have a pretend white collar criminal boyfriend.)

Review #5: Gone Girl, by Gillian Flynn

It's impossible to review this book without spoilers, but since I think I'm the last person on Earth to read this, I'm not too worried I'm going to upset anyone. Either way, fair warning: spoilers ahead.

Told in alternate voices, a technique I'm not a huge fan of, Gone Girl details the disappearance of Amy Dunne, the beautiful, smart wife of Nick Dunne, on the morning of their fifth wedding anniversary. Naturally, Nick is the prime suspect, because the husband is always guilty, but, like any good guilty husband, Nick proclaims his innocence. Of course, it's a lot harder to look innocent when it turns out that you've spent the last year sexing up one of your community college students. One of your very young, very immature community college students. And it certainly doesn't help that your wife is actually alive, has actually faked her own disappearance and death, and is a complete and utter psychopath.

Gone Girl was a runaway hit a couple of years ago, and Boss finally convinced me to read it. The beginning grabbed me right away, and then when I figured out what a total whackjob Amy Dunne was, I was really interested. But Flynn started to lose me long about the time Amy befriended the two drifters at the campground, and when Amy called her old pal Desi (also a total nutterbutter) for help, I felt like she had lost sight of who Amy really was.

I know that much has been made of the ending, and while I wasn't nuts about it, I also don't know how else Flynn could have wrapped this all up. It felt like she wrote Amy in to a corner when Desi showed up, and didn't quite know how to get out of it.

Gone Girl was good, but I felt it could be better. The potential was there for a really chilling story, and I just wasn't as impressed as I wanted to be. Perhaps if it hadn't had so much hype for so long, I would have enjoyed the story more. Still, I'd recommend it as a good read. And the movie looks like it's going to be great.

Review #45: Stalking Sapphire, by Mia Thompson

At first glance, Sapphire Dubois is like every other spoiled twenty-something living in Beverly Hills off of Daddy's money. But there's more to Sapphire than meets the eye. She hunts serial killers. And she's caught several. She stalks them, catches them, trusses them up, and leaves them like little presents for the police.

But when one of the bad guys turns the tables on Sapphire and starts stalking her - sending her body parts from a missing woman - Sapphire realizes that she may be in over her head. Add to the mix Detective Aston Ridder and Sapphire's in big trouble.

This was an interesting concept. Sapphire was tough without being over the top. Ridder was grizzled and jaded without being a total jackass. And if you can suspend belief long enough to forget that there probably aren't a ton of serial killers in Beverly Hills, then you've got a pretty decent story. I would have liked to see a little more humor and absurdness - a la Janet Evanovich - but I enjoyed it well enough.