Game On: Tempting Twenty Eight by Janet Evanovich (2021) We started reading Janet Evanovich's bestselling and beloved Stephanie Plum comedy-mystery series (in chronological order) over 20 years ago.....
We were recovering from a fractured shoulder received during a stairway fall and holy Tylenol did these books make us laugh out loud and cheer us the hell up.........we couldn't gobble 'em up fast enough....
A new Plum adventure has since settled in as an annual holiday treat, but somewhere along the line, the series settled into a fixed, unmovable formula, as repetitive and predictable as the last Quarter Pounder you ordered at the McDonald's drive-thru.......and whatever humor is left in them rarely comes off any better than mechanical and machine-tooled.
Little wonder why loyal readers of the series like us began to wonder if Evanovich was even still writing these books or farming them out to anonymous scribblers who work from a carved-in-stone blueprint......(similar to the assembling of Hallmark Christmas movies.....)
Would we all love it if once again, Evanovich would step up, become fully engaged with the series and put out a Stephanie Plum loaded with all the with laughs, surprises and sexual combustion of the early books?
You betcha........we can dream can't we?
But right now, we'll just have to settle for "Game On", this year's standard entry and with all the expected characters, their quirks and tropes.......but little or no big boffo humor......
The good news - Stephanie, the adorable but incompetent Trenton New Jersey bounty hunter faces a genuinely creepy, dangerous and formidable quarry - Oswald Wednesday. He's an utterly insane master hacker who's bumping off a collection of minor league nerdy hackers called the Baked Potatoes.....
In hacking the evil hacker, the potatoes inadvertently stumbled upon Wednesday's plan to engineer a catastrophic mass destruction event worthy of a Bond villain. And Stephanie only thought she was chasing him because he skipped bail on a breaking and entering charge. Popping up to to help her out is Diesel, the extra-hunky, vaguely supernatural soldier-of-fortune from previous books in the series......not to mention appearances from the usual Plum Universe cast.....the crazy Grandma Mazur, the plus-size, irrepressible ex-whore Lula, and the other two rivals for Stephanie's affection, the smoldering cop Joe Morelli and the super-dooper Security master, Ranger.
With all these elements carefully put into place, "Game On" provides the usual fast and entertaining pre-holiday reading......(we don't think we've ever had to spend more than a few hours on each of these books). But anyone hoping for a Stephanie Plum book that'll recapture the spontaneous fun and explosive laughs of the earlier entries.......forget it. Not gonna happen.
As comforting and expected as a Mickey D's burger or a slice of Thanksgiving dinner's pumpkin pie, we still remain Plum happy when a new one shows up as regularly as a Wal-Mart special on flatscreens,,,which is how we know the holidays are here.......3 stars (***). (And Happy Thanksgiving to all BQ visitors and families.......
. ......try not to kill each other if politics comes up at the dinner table......
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