Kim recommended this in passing a while back - an unusual one coming from her insofar as Evanovich is a genre writer. But the thing is that her central character and narrator, Stephanie Plum, is a wonderful creation - she's a tough, no nonsense, but all too fallible dame, and immensely likeable. Reminds me a bit of Bridget Jones at times, parallels including:
- a tendency to end up in undignified situations (amongst other things, Plum finds herself crouched under a bush for most of a rainy night, handcuffed naked to her shower rail, and scrabbling around for a set of car keys in a rubbish dumpster)
- a circle of eccentric colleagues, friends and family
- their clipped, somewhat arch tone of narration
- a penchant for exhortations towards self-improvement.
But then again, I seem to have become worryingly fixated upon that latter as a reference point at some point in the last few years, and anyway they're really not very similar - Plum's much less comfortably middle-class and preoccupied by relationship issues than Fielding's creation, and it's difficult to imagine Jones rubbing shoulders with the assorted low-lives, criminals and bottom-feeders who make up Plum's milieu, or tackling the profession of bounty hunting with such stumbling elan...
The writing is crisp and sharp, and often very funny if occasionally just slightly too flip; likewise the dialogue. (From early in the novel: "The clock on the dash told me I was seven minutes late, and the urge to scream told me I was home.") Pace is rapid; pages fly by. A good 'un.
