Four To Score

From Publisher's Weekly...
Half-Hungarian, half-Italian and all-Jersey, Trenton's best-known bounty hunter, Stephanie Plum, is a raucous delight in this fast-paced sequel to Three to Get Deadly (1997). There's no such thing as a simple assignment for Stephanie. When Maxine Nowicki, charged with stealing her boyfriend's car, skips her court appearance, she's fair game to be hauled in--no big challenge, thinks Stephanie. Wrong. Before the case is over, Stephanie will invade an Atlantic City casino with her intrepid allies: sneaker-shod Grandma Mazur; her colleague Lula, ""a two-hundred pound black woman with blond baloney curls all dressed up like Cher on a bad day""; and Sally, a seven-foot transvestite rock singer. Although Stephanie is the bounty hunter, she's the only one of the quartet who isn't armed. She also loses another car and her apartment, moves in with handsome cop and longtime love interest, Joe Morelli (causing a stir in his family and hers), has several memorable run-ins with arch rival Joyce Barnhardt, discovers a corpse and, finally, catches her quarry. With her brash exterior and high emotionality, Stephanie Plum is a welcome antidote to suave professional PIs. The supporting cast members, eccentric and recognizable, are as entertaining as those devised by Westlake and Leonard. Major ad/promo; author tour. (June)

This book is hilarious!

Three to Get Deadly

From Publisher's Weekly...
Trenton, N.J., bounty hunter and former lingerie buyer Stephanie Plum (last seen in Two for the Dough) becomes persona non grata when she tracks down a neighborhood saint who has failed to show up for his court appearance. No one wants to help Stephanie, who works for her bail-bondsman cousin, Vinnie. While questioning admirers of the man nicknamed Uncle Mo, Stephanie is attacked and knocked out as she cases his candy store. She comes to next to the dead body of her attacker, who turns out to be a well-known drug dealer. Suddenly, she can't avoid stumbling across the bodies of dead drug dealers: one in a dumpster, one in a closet and four in the candy store basement. Stephanie suspects that mild-mannered Mo has become a vigilante and is cleaning up the streets in a one-man killing spree. But when she's repeatedly threatened by men wearing ski masks, she wonders if Mo has company and just might be in over his head. Despite her new clownish orange hair job, Stephanie muddles through another case full of snappy one-liners as well as corpses. By turns buttressed and hobbled by her charmingly clueless family and various cohorts (including streetwise co-worker Lulu, detective and heartthrob Morelli and professional bounty hunter Ranger), the redoubtable Stephanie is a character crying out for a screen debut.

Loved this book!

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

From Publisher's Weekly...
EXTREMELY LOUD AND INCREDIBLY CLOSE Jonathan Safran Foer . Houghton Mifflin , $24.95 (368p) ISBN 0-618-32970-6 Oskar Schell, hero of this brilliant follow-up to Foer's bestselling Everything Is Illuminated , is a nine-year-old amateur inventor, jewelry designer, astrophysicist, tambourine player and pacifist. Like the second-language narrator of Illuminated , Oskar turns his naïvely precocious vocabulary to the understanding of historical tragedy, as he searches New York for the lock that matches a mysterious key left by his father when he was killed in the September 11 attacks, a quest that intertwines with the story of his grandparents, whose lives were blighted by the firebombing of Dresden. Foer embellishes the narrative with evocative graphics, including photographs, colored highlights and passages of illegibly overwritten text, and takes his unique flair for the poetry of miscommunication to occasionally gimmicky lengths, like a two-page soliloquy written entirely in numerical code. Although not quite the comic tour de force that Illuminated was, the novel is replete with hilarious and appalling passages, as when, during show-and-tell, Oskar plays a harrowing recording by a Hiroshima survivor and then launches into a Poindexterish disquisition on the bomb's "charring effect." It's more of a challenge to play in the same way with the very recent collapse of the towers, but Foer gambles on the power of his protagonist's voice to transform the cataclysm from raw current event to a tragedy at once visceral and mythical. Unafraid to show his traumatized characters' constant groping for emotional catharsis, Foer demonstrates once again that he is one of the few contemporary writers willing to risk sentimentalism in order to address great questions of truth, love and beauty.

Hmmmm...an interesting book, which I liked, although it was difficult to follow at times. I'm waiting for the movie to come out in the dollar theaters.

Two for the Dough

Sassy, brassy Stephanie Plum, the bounty hunter from Trenton, N.J., introduced to acclaim in last year's One for the Money, returns to track a bond jumper through her blue-collar neighborhood known as the ``burg.'' A local funeral home, a slimy undertaker and mutilated corpses figure large in the search for Kenny Mancuso, who, having shot an old high-school friend in the knee, posted bail with Stephanie's boss, her cousin, and then disappeared. When the old friend is shot again, fatally, Stephanie reluctantly joins forces with her sexy enemy and love interest, Trenton homicide cop Joe Morelli. While looking for Kenny, Stephanie also searches for 24 caskets stolen from Spiro Stiva, heir apparent of Stiva's Mortuary and also a high-school buddy of Kenny's. As body parts, cut from ``clients'' on view at Stiva's, are used to warn people off the case, Stephanie and Morelli spar in a lively if expected fashion and Stephanie's feisty gun-toting Grandma Mazur forsakes her usual routine of talk-show TV and attending wakes to join the fight against crime. Readers will likely stay a few steps ahead of the sleuths, but the sharp repartee and Stephanie's slightly cynical but still fond relationship with her family and the burg hold a treasury of urban-style charms. $100,000 ad/promo; Mystery Guild selection; Literary Guild alternate selection; author tour. (Jan.)

Hilarious! I love these books!

Little Face

Publisher's Weekly...
British author Hannah (Hurting Distance ) weaves together two narrative voices to create this complex and occasionally forced thriller set in rural England. Excitable new mother Alice Fancourt calls the police, claiming her baby girl has been replaced by a nearly identical infant. Alice believes her husband, David, is responsible, but it soon appears that David's mother, the rich and formidable Vivienne, is up to no good. Det. Simon Waterhouse has a soft spot for the possibly delusional Alice, with whom he alternates narration, but his undeveloped character renders their relationship, or lack thereof, of little interest. More engrossing is Waterhouse's complicated friendship with his boss, Sgt. “Charlie” Zailer, a feisty, appealing woman with a major crush on her subordinate. When Alice and the baby disappear and the police reopen the murder investigation of David's first wife, some interesting discoveries are made, but readers enticed by the intriguing opening will find the payoff ultimately unsatisfying. (Oct.)

This book was ok, not excellent. In the end I wasn't convinced that Alice was able to do what she did.....

One For The Money

From Publisher's Weekly...
First novels this funny and self-assured come along rarely; dialogue this astute and raunchy is equally unusual. The gutsy heroine introduced here is Stephanie Plum of Trenton, N.J., a recently laid-off lingerie buyer who has no job, no car and no furniture. She does have a hamster, a deranged grandmother, two caring parents and several pairs of biking shorts and sports bras. Finding work with her cousin Vinnie, she becomes a bond hunter and scrounges money enough to buy a gun, a Chevy Nova and some Mace. Her first assignment is to locate a cop accused of murder. Joe Morelli grew up in Stephanie's neighborhood. Possessed of legendary charm, he relieved Stephanie of her virginity when she was 16 (she later ran over him with a car). In her search, Stephanie catches her prey, loses him and grills a psychotic prizefighter, the employer of the man Morelli shot. She steals Morelli's car and then installs an alarm so he can't steal it back. Resourceful and tough, Stephanie has less difficulty finding her man than deciding what she wants to do with him once she's got him. While the link between the fighter and the cop isn't clear until too late in the plot, Evanovich's debut is a delightful romp and Stephanie flaunts a rough-edged appeal. Mystery Guild alternate; author tour; film rights optioned to Tri-Star.

I read this book a long time ago, but re-read it last week (while sitting in jury duty!) in anticipation of seeing the movie.