THIS is Janet Evanovitch's second thriller featuring New Jersey bounty" hunter Stephanie Plum, and it is praise indeed to say that it is just as good as the first. One reads for many reasons to gain enlightenment, learning, a more rounded outlook on life, but especially one reads to be amused and entertained. Using that last criterion, I have no hesitation in recommending Two for the Dough.
Ms Evanovitch has a devilish sense of fun and a rare line in scatological dialogue. Her heroine, now 30 and divorced, lives in Trenton, New Jersey, and comes from one of those inward looking and multi related families usually to be found where ethnic minorities settle.
In her case the family is Hungarian, and its anthill like scuttling is mirror imaged by the Italian Morelli tribe. Numbered among this battling convocation is Stephanie's bete noir, New Jersey cop Joe Morelli, who, in his earlier incarnation as a street wise 16 year old, had his way with formerly trusting Stephanie in her parents garage.
Now they live in uneasy alliance, thrown together because of the courses they have pursued, Stephanie on the trail of bail absconders, Joe intent on throwing the same dirt bags into the hoosegow. When, as in this instance, the offender happens to be at one and the same time a bail bond breaker and Morelli's cousin, it is a question of an irresistible force meeting up with an immovable object.
The guy in question is Kenny Mancuso, who shot his best friend in the knee and then took off when Stephanie's cousin Vinnie, for whom she works, posted bail. Stephanie is on the trail for obvious reasons, but Morelli is keeping his cards close to his chest and refusing to let Stephanie in on why he's so eager to lay hands on Kenny.
The plot thickens when high powered weapons stolen from an army post turn up and are used to kill policemen. It seems Kenny was stationed at the particular compound until his discharge and could well have been involved in the robbery. When Stephanie is hired by local undertaker Spiro Stiva to look for 25 missing caskets, she begins to suspect that she is into something serious and, before long, she is proved right.
The unfolding of the plot and the love/hate relationship between the two main characters would of themselves be enough to keep readers focused, but Evanovitch throws in much more. For instance, there is Grandma Mazur, Stephanie's mother's mother, and one of the most rib tickling creations I have come across in fiction for many a day.
This old lady's chief interest in life is going to viewings wakes we'd call them and there is a hilarious scene where, in the process of admiring a corpse's ring, she reaches into the coffin and" comes up with a wax finger which Stiva has had to graft on in place of the real one seems that villain Kenny, for his own nefarious purposes, hacked it off.
His purpose, indeed, was to leave it for Stephanie to find, and throughout the story various other bits and pieces turn up, including, in one climactic scene, a man's private part. Grandma Mazur, having seen it, confides to an acquaintance, Lula, that it reminded her of her husband.
"Lula leaned forward so she could whisper, You talking about size? Was your man's part that big?"
`Heck no,' Grandma said. "His part was that dead."
At the centre of all the rigmarole is the figure of the truly original Stephanie Plum, with her outrageous taste in clothes, her liking for all the wrong kind of foods, her sassy tongue and her indefatigable sense of humour. Two for the Dough may not enlarge your store of human knowledge or make you a better person, but it will certainly cause you to chuckle and leave you in a very merry frame of mind. I hated finishing it.
