Eleven on Top by Janet Evanovich: A review

Note to my readers: For the next several days, I will be on the road engaging in my own personal spring break. While I am gone, I am scheduling posts of a few of my book reviews that have been posted on Goodreads but never on this blog. I hope you'll find them entertaining.

This first one is from Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum series. For several years, I read these books obsessively whenever a new one came out. Then, at some point, I fell out of love with them. But this one was read during the time when I still enjoyed them. 

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Eleven on Top by Janet Evanovich
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This was a fun read.  It may be my favorite installment in the series so far.

Stephanie's life is in crisis - as usual.  She's having second and third thoughts about her choice of a career.  On third thought, she quits and takes a series of boring, "normal" jobs, most of which last less than one day before she is fired.

Meantime, she's being threatened by someone leaving her nasty notes and blowing up or setting fire to her cars as warnings.  To keep her out of trouble and out of harm's way, Ranger offers her a desk job with his company, Rangeman.  She takes it, of course, and thus begins a whole new phase in her career as an investigator.

Morelli gets himself run over by the miscreant who's after Stephanie.  His leg is broken in two places and he's laid up, with Stephanie as his night nurse.  We know where this is leading!

Lula is promoted to bounty hunter to take Stephanie's position at Vinnie's.  Stephanie is finagled into accompanying her on several takedowns that go - hilariously - wrong.

Stephanie's sister has decided to marry the father of her baby and Stephanie will be matron of honor - in an eggplant-colored dress.

Grandma Mazur is still looking for excuses to shoot somebody.

All in all, just another typical caper in Trenton, New Jersey, but it is a delightful read.     


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Finger Lickin' Fifteen by Janet Evanovich: A review

(Note: This summer I'm posting some of my old book reviews here - reviews that were published on Goodreads but never before here. This one appeared on Goodreads on August 4, 2009 as I was beginning to fall out of love with the Stephanie Plum series.)

Finger Lickin' Fifteen by Janet Evanovich
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

So what's with Evanonvich's sudden obsession with farts?  And why is it that only one of her characters performs this most human of functions?  It seems like on every third page of this book Lula lets go another big one.  Always Lula.  Obviously, it is supposed to be hilarious.  Now if RANGER let go a big one, that would be truly hilarious!  Oh, I forgot.  Ranger is perfect.  He doesn't fart.

And herein lies my problem with this book.  Yes, it is another quick, funny trip through the whacked-out landscape of the underbelly of Trenton as seen through the eyes of Stephanie Plum.  It has all the touches we've come to expect.  Stephanie and Morelli are on the outs so there isn't much hot sex this time - only implied and/or interrupted hot sex with Ranger and/or Morelli.  But everything else is here - the crazy skips, the wacky friends, the insane Grandma, the longsuffering Mom and Pop Plum, the exploding cars.  Still, I found it oddly unsatisfying.

Analyzing it, I decided that the source of my discomfort is the fact that Lula has become the butt (pun intended) of all jokes.  She seems to exist as nothing more than a cartoon character, someone at whom we are supposed to laugh knowingly and indulgently, secure in the knowledge that we would never do anything that buffoonish.

She is a fat, black, loud former prostitute who lives to eat fried chicken and have sex.  In other words, she is a cardboard stereotype of the kind that we see in so many movies and sitcoms.  I understand that these entire books are peopled by stereotypes and that we are not meant to take them seriously.  And yet...I am particularly offended by Lula. Not because I am a fat, black, loud former prostitute who lives for fried chicken and sex, but maybe, mostly, just because we share the same race - human.

I believe most sincerely though that most fat, black, loud former prostitutes have more to them than this series would indicate, and would it kill Evanovich to give this character a little depth?

Oh, well, I suppose I'm spitting in the wind.  As long as these books continue to sell millions of copies and wind up on the top ten of the New York Times best sellers, why should Evanovich change her formula?  I probably wouldn't either.      

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Notorious Nineteen by Janet Evanovich: A review

The most inept bounty hunter in the state of New Jersey and possibly on the face of the earth, along with her equally inept sidekick, is at it again. Yes, Stephanie Plum and Lula are busily chasing skips around Trenton. Chasing, rarely catching.

This time, Stephanie is on the trail of Geoffrey Cubbin, facing trial for embezzling millions from Trenton’s premier assisted-living facility. Geoffrey mysteriously disappeared from the hospital after an emergency appendectomy. Now Stephanie needs to find him so that her boss, Vinnie, will not have to forfeit all that bond money. But Cubbin has vanished without a trace, without a clue, and five million dollars of embezzled funds are missing.

Things take a sinister turn when it becomes known that Cubbin isn't the first patient to vanish from this hospital. He isn't the last either, for soon, another post-surgery patient who was facing trial also vanishes in the middle of the night. What could be happening here? Obviously, they must be receiving help from somewhere, but from whom and why? And does it have a connection to another mysterious medical facility simply called The Clinic? A night nurse at the hospital also moonlights at The Clinic so there is a link, but beyond that, Stephanie and her team are unable to find out what is going on. Or to find Geoffrey Cubbin.

As usual, Stephanie gets help from her crazy Grandma Mazur in breaking the case. Grandma goes undercover at the assisted living facility to see if she can get a lead and she provides the clue that finally cracks the facade of deception.

Meanwhile, Stephanie is doing her own moonlighting with the security firm of the hot and sexy Ranger. Their case leads them back into Ranger's days with Special Forces. It seems that a member of his former unit that he thought was dead may not be. He's back and looking for vengeance for some imagined fault of Ranger's and another member of the group.  The question is will Ranger be able to track him down before he starts killing the people against whom he has a grudge.

Of course, while all of this is going on, Stephanie is also chasing her usual caseload of low-level skips and losers and she keeps missing them in her usual helter skelter fashion. In that she is most ineptly assisted by Lula.

Lula is a really problematic character for me. She is such a stereotype. She is fat and constantly thinks about food or sex - mostly food, in this entry. She is black. She wears outrageous costumes and hairstyles. She is a former whore - or "'ho" in her vocabulary. Her humor is mostly scatological. In other words, she's the typical big, brassy, black woman of so many blaxpoitation movies and television shows. I really find her offensive.

As for Stephanie, she's a caricature of  another kind - the cute, perky nincompoop whom all the boys are crazy for. She has two hot guys, the good guy cop Morelli and the dangerous guy Ranger, constantly panting after her and vying to get her into bed. It's never made clear just what her attraction is for these two perfect specimens. It's a fantasy worthy of any romance novel. 

In fact, that is pretty much what the Stephanie Plum novels are - romance masquerading as mystery.  They are fun reads and they certainly don't tax the brain or the emotions. Just don't expect too much from them and you won't be disappointed. 
 

Explosive Eighteen by Janet Evanovich: A review

You always know what you are going to get with a Janet Evanovich Stephanie Plum novel. Stereotypical New Jersey mob references. A basically incompetent bounty hunter who couldn't catch a cold without major assistance from the big, strong, sexy men in her life. Kooky bail-jumpers who are generally of the comic book character variety and who will lead Stephanie and her "wingman" Lula a merry chase throughout the book. Stephanie's exploding cars or, as an alternative, stolen cars. Stephanie's crazy grandma who is hooked on "showings" at the local funeral home. Implied hot sex between Stephanie and two hot men - although not at the same time. Lula wearing skimpy outrageous clothes that barely cover her fat body and taking umbrage at anyone uses the word "fat" in her presence and constantly eating fried chicken and/or doughnuts and frequent references to her former career as a 'ho. Well, it's all there in this book, too.

That being said - basically, that these books are very predictable - Evanovich still manages to weave it all together in an amusing pattern. This is a fun and very quick read. Evanovich knows how to keep the action flowing and the pages turning.

The opening finds Stephanie on a plane returning from a mysterious vacation in Hawaii. It is implied that the vacation was a romantic interlude with one of the men in her life - a vacation that went awry and ended badly - but we don't get to know just how badly at first. Stephanie won't talk about it. She just tells her friends, "It's complicated."

Soon after she returns to Trenton and goes to her parents' house to do laundry, she finds a large manila envelope among her belongings. She opens it to find a picture of an unknown man. She doesn't know where the envelope and picture came from and she dumps it in the trash. The next thing she knows, the FBI and the New Jersey mob and someone who may be Russian and a local hairdresser are trying to bully her into turning over the picture to them. They won't believe her when she tells them she doesn't know where it is, that it went into the trash.

Meantime, both Joe Morelli and Ranger, Stephanie's two lovers, are sporting bruises which seem to be connected somehow to Stephanie's Hawaii trip. Neither of the men are happy with Stephanie, which, of course, doesn't keep either of them from screwing her every chance they get.

In the middle of all of this action, Stephanie and Lula continue to pursue their crazy "skips" who mostly escape their clutches in amusing ways several times before finally being cuffed and delivered to the police. 

The plots are always the same, the main characters (with the possible exception of Joe Morelli who seems to be turning into an adult) never grow or change. Yes, you always know what you are going to get with a Stephanie Plum mystery. Or is it a Stephanie Plum romance? Maybe we should call them rom-mysts. Whatever. I can't deny that they are fun to read.

Smokin' Seventeen by Janet Evanovich: A review

This was a fun and fluffy summer read. I have been seriously disappointed in the last couple of books in this series, but this one, while not the best, did not disappoint.

There is nothing really new here. Stephanie is still chasing the same crazy FTAs (failure to appear) and her partner, Lula, is still wearing wildly inappropriate clothing and obsessing over her weight. At least Evanovich dropped the Lula fart jokes in this one, which was a step in the right direction. But Lula is still nothing but a stereotype.

Stephanie is the same incompetent bounty hunter that she was in the first book. At some point during this book, she says to herself, "I'm a better bounty hunter than I was a year ago." No, she isn't.

The two men who vie for her affections, Joe Morelli and Ranger, are still there and still besotted with her. And why is that exactly? There is no clue to Stephanie's tremendous appeal for these luscious hunks of manhood. I saw one review that mentioned that she must have a "magic vagina" that offers pleasures that no other woman's vagina can offer. Maybe that's it.

Rex the hamster is still there, breaking all previous longevity records for hamsters.

Crazy Grandma Mazur is still there going to her "viewings" and trying to open the caskets at closed casket events.

All the usual suspects, in other words, are present and accounted for and this time there are at least three baddies who want to kill Stephanie. She doesn't figure out who the third of the trio is until the end, although it was perfectly obvious to anyone who could read fairly early on in the book.

You always know what you are going to get with Janet Evanovich - comic relief. She's no Sue Grafton and certainly no Sara Paretsky and I don't think she aspires to be. She and her many fans are perfectly happy endlessly chewing over the same plot line with characters who never grow or change. She's found a winning formula and she's going to stick to it. And this time out, I didn't find that formula annoying. It kept me amused, almost to the end.