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Fearless Fourteen

Janet Evanovich
Plum Lovin'

Janet Evanovich
One for the Money

Janet Evanovich
Twelve Sharp

Janet Evanovich
American Tabloid

James Ellroy
Hot Six

Janet Evanovich
Four to Score

Janet Evanovich

Stephanie Plum, the trash-talking New Jersey bail bondswoman of this popular series, is tracking Maxine Nowicki who's wanted for skipping out on a car-theft charge lodged by her ex-boyfriend. Now the ex-boyfriend's very interested in getting back the love letters he supposedly wrote to Maxine. But what he's really looking for is the secret on which Evanovich hangs her screwball cast of colourful minor characters, including Sally Sweet, a cross-dressing drag queen; Lula, the 250-pound ex-hooker who works for Steph's boss; Cousin Vinnie, the bail bondsman; Grandma Mazur, who packs a Glock and is always looking for a little action; and Joyce, a wannabe bounty hunter who's been cramping Steph's style since she played pass the salami with Steph's ex-husband. The action doesn't get much farther from Trenton than the Jersey Shore, but when Steph's apartment and car are blown up by the others on Maxine's trail and she moves in with Joe Morelli, the handsome, arrogant cop she's been hung up on since high school, it gets hotter than the craps table in Atlantic City. Plum's fans won't be disappointed in this fourth outing in the series, and they're likely to be even more interested in the snappy patter and sexy shenanigans than in the mystery that holds it all together. --Jane Adams
Two for the Dough

Janet Evanovich
Three to Get Deadly

Janet Evanovich
High Five

Janet Evanovich

"Uncle Fred was someone I saw at weddings and funerals and once in a while at Giovichinni's Meat Market, ordering a quarter pound of olive loaf. Eddie Such, the butcher, would have the olive loaf on the scale and Uncle Fred would say: 'You've got the olive loaf on a piece of waxed paper. How much does that piece of waxed paper weigh? You're not gonna charge me for that waxed paper, are you? I want some money off for the waxed paper.' "
The speaker is Stephanie Plum, the glamorous if slightly ditzy bounty hunter from Trenton, New Jersey, and one of the most original creations in recent mystery fiction.
In this fifth entry in Janet Evanovich's increasingly popular series, Stephanie's problems are many and varied. She's not making enough moneypicking up FTAs (Failures to Appear) for her cousin Vinnie, of Vincent PlumBail Bonds; her red-hot love affair with Detective Joe Morelli has cooled off; and her giant extended family is no help at all. For instance, Uncle Fred the cheapskate has disappeared, leaving behind some suspicious photographs of body parts in garbage bags and links to some really dangerous people.
When Stephanie turns to her friend and mentor, Ranger, for financial advice, he gets her involved in a gang of toughs doing instant evictions for landlords. (She complains to Ranger about the job and its dangers, prompting one of the hired thug to say, "Man, you don't like to get shot. You don't like to get arrested. You don't know how to have fun at all.")
Most of Stephanie's charm, of course, comes from her attitude--a combination of the brazen bravado that turns a failed lingerie model into bounty hunter in the first place and the normal fears of a person in over her head.
Other Plums in paperback, by the numbers: One for the Money, Two for the Dough, Three to Get Deadly, and Four to Score. --Dick Adler
L.A. Confidential

James Ellroy
Plum Boxed Set 4 (10, 11, 12): Contains Ten Big Ones, Eleven on Top, and Twelve Sharp (Stephanie Plum Novels)

Janet Evanovich
The Black Dahlia

James Ellroy
The Big Nowhere

James Ellroy
Plum Lucky (Stephanie Plum Novels)

Janet Evanovich
To the Nines

Janet Evanovich
L.A.Noir: The Lloyd Hopkins Trilogy - "Blood on the Moon", "Because the Night", "Suicide Hill" (The Lloyd Hopkins Trilogy)

James Ellroy
White Jazz

James Ellroy
The Cold Six Thousand

James Ellroy

It is the day of Jack Kennedy's assassination--Las Vegas cop Wayne Tedrow Jr arrives in Dallas with instructions to arrest a pimp and make sure he does not survive the arrest. By the time James Ellroy's monumental thriller The Cold Six Thousand reaches its climax, Wayne has taken his own private journey into the heart of American corruption, into a cold hell of betrayal, prejudice and paranoia. In staccato sentences, brief paragraphs of narration and stacks of documentation whose essential truthfulness we dread, we learn the truth about the great assassinations of liberal hope, about the inner-city epidemic of heroin addiction, about the war in Vietnam and the American conflict with Cuba. Wayne and others like him--the ageing hit man Bondurant, the fallen, liberal FBI-man Littell--are the weapons through which the likes of Howard Hughes and J Edgar Hoover work their will. This is a convincingly depressing picture of a world in which the worst things you can imagine regularly come true (because there is always someone who will profit by them). It is a nightmare picture of America-as-Hell which sustains dramatic tension from dateline to dateline, from crisis to crisis. --Roz Kaveney
Hard Eight

Janet Evanovich