Sizzling hot and criminally cool beach reads

Tag : electronic weighing machine

Trenton, N.J., bounty hunter Stephanie Plum is back, as intrepid,softhearted, danger-prone and funny as ever. As the story opens shenabs an old high school classmate, Loretta Rizzi, for skipping hercourt appearance on armed robbery charges. Loretta held up a liquorstore for one bottle of gin.
There's no one to take care of Loretta's teenage son, Mario, akaZook, graffiti artist and video-game champ, so Stephanie agrees tolook after him briefly, just until Loretta can be re-bonded.Naturally this brief favor balloons as Loretta at first fails toget rebonded and then goes missing.
Meanwhile Stephanie is helping bounty hunter Ranger, the taciturn,black-clad, lean machine and sometime lover, guard anover-the-hill, out-of-control celebrity from a rather nebbishy andpsychic stalker. She has to call on cop boyfriend Joe Morelli tohelp out with the kid.
And Loretta's brother Dom, just out of prison for a bank robberythat netted $9 million — never recovered — is furiousthat Zook is with Morelli, who he thinks cheated him out of hisaunt's house and is the kid's deadbeat father. Loretta nevermarried and never said and Zook does look like Morelli but thenMorelli is a cousin ...;
Mayhem ensues as a dead man turns up in Morelli's basement, GrandmaMazur becomes a gamer and Stephanie finds herself hiding under thebed while a couple of killers toss Dom's hideout, looking for alead to the bank-job loot.
Fast-paced, playful, zany, and as diverting as a day at the beach,Evanovich's 14th Plum novel should please her legions of fans.
Data mining and identity theft drive the fast-paced plot asquadriplegic detective Lincoln Rhyme and his partner/lover AmeliaSachs attempt to clear Rhyme's estranged cousin, Arthur, of murdercharges.
A look at the slam-dunk evidence suggests to Rhyme, a consultantfor the NYPD, that someone may have framed Arthur. A little moredigging produces several other cases — closed, the supposedperps jailed — with the same anomalies. If he's right, somesophisticated identity theft is involved.
Point of view switches to the real killer, a self-satisfiedcollector who attaches numbers to people before he adds them to hismacabre — and extensive — collection. He's awaiting hisnext victim, a young woman whose life has been thoroughly mappedout, as has that of the designated fall guy.
While the police are none too happy about re-opening solved cases,Rhyme comes achingly close to nabbing the guy, managing at least tointercept his manufactured evidence and get the NYPD on board. Hisinvestigation leads to a huge data mining company with clients thatencompass not just corporations but government — includingthe NYPD.
And when the killer realizes the law is on his trail he doesn't run— he fights — with all the data at his command.
The chase twists and turns as Deaver ramps up the suspense, cuttingbetween characters and scenes. As the pages flip by, Orwell's"1984" casts a long shadow and the reader shudders to realize howthe foundations of society (to say nothing of the individual) reston electronic data more solidly than on the bedrock of the earth.Pretty scary — and a fun read too.
When a high-profile San Francisco prosecutor drives her powerfulBMW off an overpass, killing herself and the passengers of ashuttle van, the police ask forensic psychiatrist Jo Beckett tolook into this latest in a series of high-profile murder-suicides.
Beckett, a loner, haunted by longing for her dead husband, isn'tused to tight timetables. She investigates dead people, carefullyweighing all the evidence to determine suicide or murder. But SFPDLt. Amy Tang has given Beckett 48 hours. According to the pattern,that's when the next death is due.
They soon uncover a link — the Dirty Secrets Club. What it isand who belongs though — these are secrets that will takethem all over the city, currently undergoing a series of unsettlingearthquakes, and make Jo a target. Gardiner switches point of view,mostly between Beckett and the killer and his accomplice, buildingsuspense and giving the reader access to the killer's plans andmotivations.
But Gardiner skillfully keeps plenty of balls in the air, rightdown through the long, final, peril-stoked, San Francisco chase.Beckett is an engaging protagonist and the well-paced acceleratingplot and cinematic writing bodes well for this U.S. hardcoverdebut.
Gardiner, though a California native, lives in Britain where shehas published a number of thrillers featuring California journalistEvan Delaney, now appearing in the United States in paperback,thanks at least in part to the enthusiasm of Stephen King whocalled her "the next suspense superstar" in a recent review.Readers will welcome the chance to decide for themselves.