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FEARLESS FOURTEEN
by Janet Evanovich
Headline, June 2008
320 pages
18.99 GBP
ISBN: 0755337603


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

I don't care, you can all sneer as much as you like, but Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum series is one of my top guilty pleasures. Yes thank you, I've heard all the criticisms before, that the pony is of the one-trick sort. But you mistake me for someone who gives a damn . . .

Humour is devilishly hard to do in crime fiction, and there are other writers around attempting it who leave me cold. But Evanovich never fails to make me smile – or to laugh out loud at regular intervals.

What she does well is to create a cast of eccentrics who stop a millimetre or two short of going over the top. In FEARLESS FOURTEEN there are the usual suspects – Stephanie and her ménage of not quite trois with Morelli and Ranger, Grandma Mazur (who has a new addiction), Lulu (who has wedding bells ringing loudly in her head) and long-suffering bond office manager Connie.

This time out, she introduces us to more of Morelli's weird family (all you need to know is that most of Trenton appears to be related or at school together), mixed in with fading country star Brenda and her personal stalker, and Mooner, the most stoned and useless investigator on the planet.

Morelli is suddenly in danger after his bank-robber cousin Dom Rizzi is released from prison. Strange people keep breaking into his basement, he gets threatening messages, and Rizzi's sister Loretta is kidnapped. Cue Keystone Kops round the streets of Trenton, New Jersey.

The plotting is fine. A lot of the situations may be familiar – graveyards and gormless bail-jumpers and goo seem to appear regularly in the books – but the story rattles along at a break-neck pace, and underlying it all is a little band of steel that often gets overlooked.

The main strength of Evanovich's writing is in her throwaway dialogue, where you often end up going back and enjoying the razor-sharp one-liners all over again. And someone who can make me laugh hysterically 14 books into a series and devour the novel in one sitting has to be doing something right.

Reviewed by Sharon Wheeler, June 2008

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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