twelve sharp

Ok, I read a book, so to speak. I loved these Stephanie Plum books when I first started reading them - they were, on occasion downright, laugh-out-loud hilarious. The schtick got a bit tired after the first five or six and here we are at number twelve.

Lean Mean Thirteen was actually one of the books that I read last year that didn't even merit mention (there you go, out of order and I didn't even realise). It seems as though for Evanovich the crime storylines are just vehicles for the humour and in each book they become more and more outlandish, and she is more and more out of her depth handling them. Some of the hilarity is still there in Twelve Sharp but it is a very uncomfortable bedfellow with the main storyline of identity theft, kidnap, stalking and psychosis. I was also very uncomfortable with the scene in which (spoiler here) an eleven-year-old child shoots a man.

It also really struck me (and annoyed me) that although Stephanie is supposedly a 'bounty hunter', all too often her captures of fugitive criminals are actually made by Ranger or one of his employees. So she's not really even doing the job herself but constantly being saved by big silent men in big black cars named Tank (and that's the guy, not the car).

Twelve sharp? Ah no, time to retire.