You know, the writers whose books are arranged in high piles at the airport newsstands.......
Sooner or later, they end up as a literary version of McDonald's........pumping out repetitive fiction much in the same way Mickey D's slaps together quarter pounders and Big Macs.
Hey, we're not complaining. There's nothing wrong with literary comfort food........the books you can scarf down like buttered popcorn.......the books that can help you endure a four hour flight while squished into a sardine-sized coach seat.
Trouble is, this kind of success tends to breed laziness in the writers. After years and years of serving up their hardcover Big Macs, they turn sloppy and careless in putting them together.....
So you end up with Book Macs missing stuff......the lettuce, the tomato.....sometimes even the Special Sauce......the ingredient that got you hooked in the first place.
"Hardcore Twenty Four", as you might have already guessed, is the 24th comic misadventure of the sexy but incompetent Trenton New Jersey bounty hunter Stephanie Plum.
The 'comic' part of these comedy-mysteries withered away after the first dozen or so in this series. At some point author Evanovich seemed to rely on pre-programmed algorithms to construct these books. They read like they'd been cobbled together by Artificial Intelligence, working off an automatic checklist of tropes.
If Evanovich still actually wrote them, they came out like she absent-mindedly typed them into her phone while on a supermarket shopping run.
For some readers, the chance to enjoy a yearly visit with the series' lovable, quirky characters supplied enough entertainment value. For many though, these books began to resemble Big Macs that not only came out of the bag ice cold, but missing the middle meat patty.
Not to mention........no Special Sauce.
Memo to Evanovich and all other mass market Fast Food Authors (that means you, James Patterson and your 8,000 co-authors, including Bill Clinton)........You wanna be McDondalds? Then you better damn well be McDonald's......
In other words........you're expected to serve up tasty junk food every time we step up to the counter. No shorting us all the juicy, fried crap we came for.
Sorry Janet, but you fell asleep again on your latest shift in the kitchen. You left out half the meat and the Special Sauce.........1 & 1/2 stars (* 1/2). Keep that up and we might as well buy a box of frozen White Castle cheeseburgers.......and watch a movie. (....but not "One For The Money", the film version of your first Plum book......that one's even worse than reading "Hardcore Twenty Four"....)
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