One for the Money; Turbo Twenty-Three; The Lady in the Lake

Whenever I spend time at my parents' house, I tend to reread the Stephanie Plum books by Janet Evanovich. Mostly because my mother has them all and I don't :) So I reread the first one, which I hadn't read in quite some time, so I actually didn't remember how it ended. It was written in 1994, which was fun, it's almost like reading a historical fiction novel at this point. Having to find pay phones to make calls. An answering machine with actual tape plays a big role.

Then I read her latest, "Turbo Twenty-Three". It was pretty good. Ranger has agreed to look into the security shortfalls at Bogart's ice cream factory. He needs Stephanie to go undercover and see if she can sniff out any bad characters. Bogart thinks his rival, Mo Morris, is deliberately sabotaging him. Ice cream and an overnight trip to Disney World with Ranger equals a win.

I wasn't sure if I'd read Raymond Chandler's "The Lady in the Lake" before or not. I read a lot of noir books as a teen: Chandler and Cain and Hammett. This one didn't seem familiar, but again, I've read "One for the Money" at least three times within the last twenty years and didn't remember it. If I read "Lady in the Lake" it was close to twenty-five years ago, and only once. At any rate, it was really good. PI Philip Marlowe is hired by Derace Kingsley, a wealthy businessman whose wife ran off. Kingsley is fine with that, he doesn't want her back, he just wants to make sure she's okay. Crystal was last seen at their vacation cabin up in Crestline. There are a lot of different leads to follow, and Marlowe finds himself looking at the death of a doctor's wife that may or may not have been murder and may or may not tie into the disappearance of Crystal Kingsley, when another dead body turns up drowned in the lake by the Kingsley's vacation home. There was a heck of a lot going on in this book, but it was interesting.