Plum Pudding
Janet
Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum’s books are a guilty pleasure—no matter how
outlandish the plots, the feisty heroine and her madcap sidekick Lula are bound
to make the reader laugh out loud.
For those who haven’t read any books in the series before,
Stephanie is a self-confessed Julie Roberts lookalike, of Italian descent and
has a crazy gun-toting Grandma Mazur, whose antics have driven her daughter
(that is Stephanie’s mother) to despair and alcoholism. She also has a hamster
as a pet, a cop boyfriend Joe Morelli and a standby ‘knight’ called Ranger—both
of them impossibly hot. In the latest of
the ‘numbered’ series, Hardcore
Twenty-Four, another hottie drops by—the enigmatic Diesel, with six-pack
abs and extra-sensory perception.
Lula is an Amazonian black woman, a former hooker, with a red
Firebird, a huge appetite and passion for shoes. She wears garish clothes and
manages to carry them off. And if some
misguided soul calls her fat, they are asking for trouble.
Stephanie is a bounty hunter, a profession not known in most
countries; they are employed by bailbondsmen to ensure that felons do not jump
bail and turn up at their trials.
Stephanie
works for her mostly absent cousin Vinnie, and with Lula’s help—plus occasional
SOS calls to security expert Ranger-- she manages to apprehend most fugitives
from justice. Some assistance comes from the office receptionist Connie, who
belongs to a Mafia clan and keeps Stephanie supplied with information and
donuts. In the process of chasing runaways and feeding Lula, she also solves
baffling murder cases, and keeps the love triangle with Morelli and Ranger as
amiable as can be.
In
Hardcore Twenty-Four, the cops are
mystified and the people of Trenton, New Jersey, terrified when headless bodies
start appearing around town. The word ‘zombie’ is uttered and believed, because
people who look like those living dead creatures are also spotted.
As
Stephanie and Lula try to keep their wits together, they promise to look after
Ethel, the massive boa constrictor owned by ‘professional’ grave robber, Simon Diggery, or
he won’t accompany them to jail. The antics of the snake and Stephanie-Lula’s
reactions, provide a lot of the book’s humour; also oddball characters like a
compulsive painter of garden gnomes and a guy called Zero Slick who joins
protest marches for a living.
As Stephanie dates Morelli and
habitually wrecks Ranger’s cars (he keep track of her, and the only reason it
does not creep her out is that he saves her skin many times), Diesel lands up
unannounced and squats in her apartment. She begins to suspect he has something
to do with the ghoulish incidents in town, but there is more to Diesel than she
can see.
Of course, Grandma Mazur gets her
share of attention, by acquiring a new “honey”, that makes her daughter look
avidly at the bottle of whiskey in the kitchen cabinet—the only way to keep her
sanity.
The reason for the headless
corpses is laughably absurd, but then who reads these books for veracity?
Hardcore Twenty-Four
By: Janet Evanovich
Publisher: G.P. Putnam's Sons
By: Janet Evanovich
Publisher: G.P. Putnam's Sons
******************
In Turbo Twenty-Three,
Stephanie Plum and Lula have to solve a most peculiar case. When they are
pursuing a convict called Larry Virgil who has stolen an ice-cream truck, a frozen
corpse falls out it, covered in chocolate and nuts.
There is rivalry between the town’s two ice-cream
manufacturers, which could be the reason for people being killed by freezing.
Ranger asks Stephanie has to go undercover in the ice-cream plant to trace the
killer.
Lula and the tiny, pesky Randy Briggs want to be TV stars, so
plan to do a shoot for a show called Naked and Afraid, and Grandma Mazur gets a
new boyfriend and her long-suffering daughter has more to worry about.
This is one of the funniest and raunchiest Janet Evanovich
books; just the thing for an idle weekend.
Turbo Twenty-Three
By Janet
Evanovich
Publisher:
Bantam
Pages: 288
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