Lean Mean Thirteen

Janet Evanovich

"My mother had told me about this author, Janet Evanovich, who wrote the Stephanie Plum series. Stephanie Plum is a character, she's an out of work factory worker who takes on a job as a bounty hunter. She's a very, very imperfect person. She's supposed to be a bounty hunter, but she never shoots her — she's bad with guns, she's bad with apprehending criminals, so this is more of a comedy of errors.

The action takes place in and around Trenton, NJ. My family were originally from Philadelphia, which as some of you know is not that far from Trenton, so we were very impressed with somebody who actually wanted to write from a place that's kind of overlooked. There's murder, but there's also a lot of comedy in them. At this time, Lean Mean Thirteen is back to being just downright goofy. There's running jokes throughout the series; for example, she has a history of bad luck with cars. So in every book we're introduced, she's driving a new car; and sometime in the book that car will be torpedoed, run off a bridge, destroyed, crashed, car bombed, set on fire. It's funny because it never gets old.

There is one particular aspect of the books that , me personally, I don't like, and that's she's — that the author, Janet Evanovich, spends a good deal of time reacquainting us with characters from previous books. On a scale of one to five stars, I would give it four stars. Mostly I would remediation them to people who aren't into your typical murder mystery. This is more for the Murder She Wrote fan."

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