(Headline Fiction, $38.99)
I felt a bit like Goldilocks on the book front this week: The first one I picked up was too long, the second one too sad and the third one too historical. I was considering swapping roles and turning into one of the bears, a grizzly at that, when I came upon Sizzling Sixteen. Finally, something that was just right.
After all, sometimes really enjoying a book has as much to do with matching it to your mood as it does to what lies within. I won’t read a gloomy memoir unless I’m feeling pretty chipper, for example, and I save grisly crime for days when I’d like to murder someone myself.
If I feel like a blub but have no reason to in real life, I lose myself in a weepy romantic and if I’ve a weekend with nothing to do, I grab something with a fistful of different timelines or foreign names and read it in one hit before I can get too confused.
When I picked up *Sizzling **Sixteen*, I was in the mood for pure unadulterated fun and because I have read the other 15 novels in the Stephanie Plum bounty-hunter series (although you definitely don’t have to), I knew that’s what I would get.
Just like Bart Simpson, Stephanie hasn’t grown much in the decade and-a-half she’s been famous, in her case for trawling the streets of New Jersey looking for the potheads and bigamists who have skipped bail. But she’s reliably funny, kind and the person most likely to come home from work smelling like dog poop, garbage, blown-up building or monkey.
She doesn’t get cranky or blue and her secrets are light and shallow: Should she get back with handsome cop boyfriend Morelli or succumb to the charms of shady security expert Ranger or just have another doughnut?
In Sizzling Sixteen, Stephanie has inherited her Uncle Pip’s lucky bottle, which has kept her from being trampled by stampeding cows, eaten by an alligator and shot while robbing a funeral home – but is that lucky enough?
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