So I read another Stephanie Plum this week too. And I loughed out loud yet again!

This time Stephanie is looking for Maxine Nowicki. She went missing with her boyfriends car and he made a complaint and had her arrested. When she fails her court hearing Stephanie enters the scene and is hired by the boyfriend to find Maxine and some papers she took. At the same time Maxine starts to leaves a trail of clues for the boyfriend, Eddie, to find and some of her friends and family start being attacked.

In this book Plum adds another character to her group - Sally, a female impersonator is the only one capable of decyphering the clues in form of puzzles Maxine is leaving for Eddie. And finds a new nemesis - Joyce Barnhardt, another female bounty hunter that Vinnie assigns to Maxine's case after seeing no results from Stephanie.
We get to know more about Morelli as Stephanie's house is burned down by an arsonist and she has to move in with him. Besides he has to protect her because she is being threatened by someone telling her to "leave my boyfriend alone", only she doesn't know who the boyfriend is.

This was another hilarious book with lots of very funny scenes. Besides the usual Lula dialogues Sally's description and vocabulary are just too funny. I couldn't stop laughing every time Lula made Joyce have "dizzy spells" and I hope Joyce will show up in future books just so Lula can deal with her.

I think this one is A range because as I'm sitting here writing this I'm laughing out loud just thinking about it.

Oooh! We get intellectuals in this one - codes no less! Don't worry, we don't have The Da Vinci Codestyle disappointment of finding out how trivial they are really because the details are not revealed, they're simply beyond Stephanie's brain and get passed on to Sally. I do like the way the cast of supporting characters is growing with each book and each of them brings something new to the party.

This was the last of the first block of these I read, as I was missing (or at least thought I was missing) 5 & 7 and, while I was looking forward to moving on, I think I needed the break just to get my breath back!

This series seems epitomise one of my problems - the guilt of a Catholic catholic reader. There's swearing and sex and mayhem and silliness in these books that a good person and intelligent reader would despise, but my voracious appetite for the written word, irreverence and black humour mean that I can't resist reading them, and enjoying the process, even if there's a nagging voice in the background telling me to get back to the more worthy 1001 list.

I enjoy these books because they make me laugh out loud. Grandma Mazur, Lula and all the ridiculous comments that get made! And I like to see if I can figure out the mystery before it's all revealed...

Book 4 was fun and I'll do book 5 soon!

here is a series of my tumblr posts that relate to this book and others of its ilk

post 1: does janet evanovich integrate the cast of jersey shore into her later stephanie plum novels?
those are really the only things i know about nj other than the fact that it smells like shit as you’re going into nyc. i remember a couple of years ago they had billboards up trying to promote how much it didn’t smell like shit. if you have to put billboards up, nah, probs aint true.

what i appreciate about j.e.’s stephanie plum novels, kathy reichs’ temperance brennan novels, and laura lippman’s tess monaghan novels is that they’re all so formulaic. (i’d mention the sookie stackhouse books but charlaine harris is fucking ridiculous. “she had muscles in her butt” will forever remain emblazoned on my mind whenever i think of her. so sry, gurl, you are not invited here.) i mean, it gets tiring after a while, as evidenced by the total loathing you can read in my goodreads reviews, but i like knowing what’s gonna happen. i’m a big fan of spoilers. and these are perfect mindless reading! this is my bread and butter when i can’t find anything smarter to read.

i love tess monaghan for the baltimore and i appreciate temperance brennan for the science, but i think stephanie plum is the best written of the three separate series. janet evanovich has clumsily (and by clumsily i mean casually racist) handled her only black character so far (i’m on four to score), a fat, “sassy” black ex-prostitute, which, blech, but barring that, her series is the most engaging. there’s none of the awkward mom talk kathy reichs so hideously exhibits (this is also a charlaine harris thing) or the kind of boring, unforgettable stuff from tess monaghan. and i love tess and her/my baltimore, but the writing isn’t particularly memorable.

if you have recommendations for any other series, preferably that i can download for free onto my kindle, pls lmk. once i’m done with stephanie plum i can go back to reading about theda krakow, journalist turned cat detective. how exciting.

post 2: something else
i also appreciate the fact that evanovich’s sex scenes aren’t cringeworthingly embarrassing. i mean, they aren’t good but it’s not like i’m sitting here thinking “UGH, MOOOOOOOM!!” on behalf of any offspring

there’s no awkward phrasing and she doesn’t use any “vulgar” terms without resorting to saying, like, hooha instead. it’s totally pg-13 without being completely puerile. gj, lady!

post 3: last something else
one thing i fucking hate is that, like every other white lady who writes this kind of vaguely trashy book, she does not stop mentioning that stephanie plum is 5’5 or something and 125 lbs in order to ~paint the picture~, but throughout the book stephanie will lament her complete and total fatness; and she’ll sometimes juxtapose that against lula, the fat and “sassy” black ex-prostitute who weighs 200 lbs

i think it’s just really telling of how thin people have no idea how fat bodies work. she writes lula as if she’s some kind of hulking obeast but that’s barely even on the fatness scale. c’mon now.