Friday, February 9, 2018

Hardcore 24 & Turbo 23



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



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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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