Evanovich Ennui - Notorious Nineteen
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Author: Janet Evanovich
Title: Notorious Nineteen Genre: mystery I was cruising though the eBooks at my local library the other day looking for something to read over my holiday break (something free, since I’d already melted the numbers off my credit cards) when I happened upon Explosive Eighteen, last year’s Stephanie Plum novel from Janet Evanovich. I hadn’t read it – which I thought was a little weird, since only days before I’d finished this year’s Stephanie Plum novel from Janet Evanovich, Notorious Nineteen. Strange: I never noticed I’d missed anything… In a nutshell, that’s where the “by the numbers” series from Evanovich has gone – you can’t tell one from another and so little changes in the main characters’ lives that I could’ve probably skipped from thirteen to nineteen without missing a thing. There’s the rub: this used to be a reliably fun (though undisputably light) series, but in recent installments it’s gotten so formulaic that you could probably stick a chapter from nineteen in the middle of seventeen (or sixteen…) and no one would notice. More’s the pity. But here: see for yourself: Stephanie Plum is broke, but her cousin Vinny the bail bondsman has a couple of high-dollar FTAs (“failure-to-appear”) whose apprehension would pay the rent on her little apartment for years and buy her a new car. At the moment, she and Lula have a small-fry type staked out, and have another file in the IN box. Her first apprehension involves someone running down the street naked. The second file involves someone loony – in this case, a homeless guy who’s carting around a Hawaiian Tiki. Grandma Mazur will dress up like a teenager, pull a hogleg at an inconvenient moment, scandalize her daughter (Steph’s mother) with her lascivious behavior, and scope out the action at the local senior center. Stephanie will burn not one or two but three cars to cinders – two by RPG and the other with a firebomb. Ranger and Morelli will alternate pulling her chestnuts out of the fire. Steph will sleep with one and have lust dreams about the other. Steph and Lula will eat their way through the Burg and Vinnie will hid in his office for 300 pages. The more things change… In the end, everything will be solved without anything much happening and Stephanie will go back to her empty apartment to coax her hamster out of the soup can so she can feed him a carrot. Did I miss anything? Other than Stephanie getting fitted for a bridesmaid dress, I don’t think so. Therein lies the problem with Notorious Nineteen: it’s just not that different from anything else in the series in the past six or twelve installments. The jokes are the same, the burning cars are the same, Ranger’s hotness is the same, Lula’s outfits are the same, Grandma’s just as horny (and as thankful for Viagra) as ever. It’s as if Evanovich has a plot template set up on her laptop and she just changes the names and crimes of the skips, swaps the names of Ranger and Morelli, and hits “GO” – the stories are all basically the same. Someone needs to look to see if the first burning car shows up one the same page every time! Evanovich seems to be devoting most of her energy to her “Wicked” series, and can you blame her. VampRom is hot, hot, hot! these days, so that would seem to be where the money is. Unlike James Patterson who apparently has a stable of ghost and semi-ghost writers, Evanovich apparently still does her own writing. If you ask me, Notorious Nineteen is proof that she’s spread herself too thin. all content copyright © 2014 by scmrak
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