Evanovich, Janet: Two For the Dough

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In this second installment in Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum series, Stephanie is tasked with locating Kenny Mancuso, a local bad boy who skipped bail after inexplicably shooting a friend in the knee. Mancuso happens to be the cousin of another local tough, Joe Morelli, a policeman and one-time paramour with whom Stephanie is continually butting heads. While Morelli is trying to track down ammo that's been stolen from a military facility and is now being used to kill cops, Stephanie is hired to find some stolen property, a garage-load of cheap caskets. Much of the action in the book thus revolves around the mortuary business whose manager is looking for the caskets, a rat-faced character who's a long-time friend of Kenny Mancuso. The low-lifes of Trenton, New Jersey, operate within a small world.

I didn't enjoy Evanovich's second Plum novel as much as the first. The writing is fine, but it doesn't sparkle as frequently as Evanovich's prose did in book one. Stephanie's bounty-hunting mentor Ranger, a character I've come to like, doesn't feature as prominently in this book. Instead, we get more than anyone could want of Stephanie's Grandma Mazur. She's one of those little old ladies who says and does things that aren't appropriate for little old ladies. Think Ruth Gordon with a firearm. We're supposed to find them cute, just like we're supposed to find precocious sitcom children cute, when in fact they're all just annoying. I'm hoping Grandma bites the dust early on in the series.

Otherwise, a decent read with a decent mystery to unravel. I'm particularly enjoying watching the lust-hate relationship between Stephanie and Morelli develop.