Thursday, July 27, 2006

Janet Evanovich Read-a-Likes

Say you've read everything about Stephanie Plum in Janet Evanovich's numbered series about the hapless (she is always described as hapless, sorry) bounty hunter from an urban but cozy neighborhood of Trenton, New Jersey: now what can you read while you eagerly await the next title in the series? I just finished Dirty Laundry by Tori Carrington. Carrington is actually a husband and wife writing team who created Greek American bounty hunter, Sofie Metropolis who operates in the Greek-American part of Astoria, Queens. Everything about her mirrors the Stephanie Plum novels. Ethnic? check. Thirtyish and single? check. Mysterious exotic potential lover? Check. Ditsy and clumsy? checkcheck and check etc etc. But this doesn't mean the book has no merit, it's just very derivative. Greek recipes included at the end. I checked BHPL's database Novelist to see what other books might appeal to Stephanie Plum enthusiasts and here is the list of authors as given by readers' advisor and columnist Joyce Saricks.
Nancy Bartholomew's stripper/detective (!) Sierra Lavotini featured in The Miracle Strip.
Sarah Stohmeyer's hairdresser/detective Bubbles Yablonsky from Lehigh, Pa.
Anthony Bruno's Loretta Kovacs novels, especially Devil's Food.
and for the more romantic, Jennifer Crusie's Welcome to Temptation.
Thanks as usual to Joyce Saricks who must read instead of sleeping. To access the Novelist database which has book reviews, book lists by theme and genre, book suggestions, go to our home page http://library.bhplnj.org and click on Remote Databases.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Oh boy!I started reading JE's Plum seris this summer and got addicted. I've read the seris twice already and for the fun of it
I just Googled "Evanovich book blog". I can't believe BHPL book blog was the first hit. I knew the story reminded me and my husband of growing up in Berkely Hgts 40- 50 yrs ago, but this is really Plum scary!!! Did I miss the cop named Morelli???

Anne said...

We've had coincidences like that before: a blog post about making a bar out of old books turned out to have been invented by a former BH resident who saw it on our blog. Thanks for stopping by our blog, come by anytime to catch up with the old neighborhood.