Four To Score - Janet Evanovich

   1998; 313 pages.  Book 4 (out of 24, soon to be 25) of the Stephanie Plum series.   New Author? : No.  Genre : Crime-Humor; Beach Novel.  Overall Rating : 8*/10.

    Stephanie Plum’s going to get rich this month.  She’s double-dipping on her present bounty hunter case.

    First, there’s the commission she’ll earn by hunting down and bringing in Maxine Nowicki, an FTA (“Failure To Appear” at a court hearing) as an authorized agent for her cousin Vinnie’s Bail Bond business.  Maxine reportedly had a tiff with her then-boyfriend, Eddie Kuntz, and took it out on him by stealing his car.  Eddie retaliated by calling the cops on her, who arrested her, but Maxine didn’t show for her trial.

    Eddie understandably cooperates with Stephanie in her efforts to track down Maxine, and has now given her an added incentive.  He’ll pay her a thousand bucks if she retrieves some love letters he wrote to Maxine in fits of passion.  He says there’s embarrassing stuff in them.

    Eddie is not exactly a lady’s man, so it’s hard to imagine what he’d deem “embarrassing” in those letters.  But hey, for a thousand dollar bonus, Stephanie is more than willing to try to recover them when she successfully brings Maxine in.

    But don’t spend all that money just yet, Steph.  For starters, your cousin Vinnie has hired a second agent to track down Maxine, so you’ve got competition for the commission.  To boot, someone is dead set on scaring, or even killing, people who might know where Maxine is.

    And I don’t think they’d have any qualms about adding you to their list of intended victims.

What’s To Like...

    The action in Four To Score starts immediately, with someone bursting in on Cousin Vinnie and threatening to shoot him.  But since the assailant is Stephanie, we know that’s not the storyline.  I was happy to see Grandma Mazur and Lula both getting some major time in this book; they’re two of my favorite characters in the series.  Morelli and Ranger are back, and there are new people to meet and greet as well, the most notable of which are Sally and Joyce.  I’m hoping they're both developed into recurring roles.

    I counted five plotlines to follow:

    a.)  Stephanie chasing down the FTA, Maxine.

    b.)  Morelli working on a secret case for the government.

    c.)  The body-part chopper-offer.

    d.)  The ardent arsonist.

    e.)  Retrieving Eddie’s love letters.

    You might think that means things get confusing, but they don't.

    As usual, the story is told in the first-person POV, Stephanie’s.  The chapters are moderate in length, 16 of them covering 313 pages.  The pacing is quick, despite the requisite “running around in circles” for a while.  As always, the book’s title has nothing to do with the story.

    I liked the phrase “erotica non grata”; I’ll have to work that into a review somewhere down the line.  Ditto for Lula’s favorite phrase “Damn skippy!”  The musical nods to Savage Garden and Metallica were neat.   For me, the real fun in any Stephanie Plum novel is the witty banter and snarky observations, and in that respect, Four To Score did not disappoint.  This was a fun, fast, easy read.

    There’s a bunch of cussing, and one torrid roll in the hay.  If such things offend you, this isn’t your kind of series.  We also should mention the 7-foot transvestite.  I’m reading this series in order, but frankly, I don’t think that’s necessary.  Stephanie and Joe Morelli still have relationship issues, and I'm guessing that will go on for quite a few more books.  Four To Score is a standalone story, as well as part of a series.

Excerpts...

    She blinked.  “I lost a finger.  Well, I didn’t actually lose it.  It was on the kitchen counter.  I took it to the hospital and got it sewed back on.”

    I had an instant vision of her finger lying on the kitchen counter.  Little black dots danced in front of my eyes, and I felt sweat pop out on my upper lip.  “I’m sorry!”

    “It was an accident,” she said.  “An accident.”

     “Which finger was it?”

    “The middle finger.”

    “Oh man, that’s my favorite finger.”  (pg. 24 )

    The rain stopped halfway home, and Trenton showed no sign of relief from the heat.  The hydrocarbon level was high enough to etch glass, and the highways hummed with road rage.  Air conditioners were failing, dogs had diarrhea, laundry mildewed in hampers, and sinus cavities filled with cement.  If the barometric pressure dropped any lower everyone’s guts would be sucked through the soles of their feet into the bowels of the earth.  (pg. 200)

 Why deal with unpleasantness today when you could get hit by a bus tomorrow?   (pg. 137)

    The quibbles are minor.  Maxine-the-FTA chooses to tease her ex-boyfriend Eddie by sending him a series of coded messages about the stuff he wants returned.  Neither Eddie nor Stephanie are any good at puzzle-solving so they enlist the aid of others.  It would’ve been fun if the reader could try to decipher those messages as well, but we’re never shown any of the codes.  I was mildly bummed.

    The ending is a mixed bag.  On one hand, the five plotlines all get tied up nicely, and all parties receive their just desserts.  On the other hand, everything gets resolved in one chapter, and that felt a bit rushed to me.

    But enough nitpicking.  Four To Score was a light and delightful read for me, which was exactly what I was looking for.  Books 5 and 6 are on my TBR shelf, waiting their turns.

    8 Stars.  Wikipedia adds a pair of droll statistics to their posts on the early Stephanie Plum books: the number of FTA’s in each story, and the number of vehicles Stephanie manages to ruin each time.  They stop doing so somewhere up in the teens of the book numbers, but here the stats were: 3 FTA’s, 2 Car-Deaths.  I'm thinking of starting to include those in these reviews.