As I listened to "Explosive Eighteen" I found myself torn between laughing at Stephanie's antics and groaning at the strain of having to suspend disbelief so hard it hurt.
I had fun. How can you listen to Lorelei King read this all-you-can-eat buffet of chaos and disaster and not have fun? But I was also a little frustrated.
I decided to vent my frustration by writing an open letter to Stephanie Plum. I hope it gets my point across. I certainly made me feel better for having written it. Here it is::
Dear Stephanie Plum,
I've just read your adventures in "Explosive Eighteen", which was a hoot, but which left me needing to say a few things to you as a friend. I mean, I know we've never met, but if we had met and we were friends, these are the things I'd wanna say.
Firstly: grow up already. You started out as a Bounty Hunter in 1994. You were young, broke and incompetent, regularly crashed vehicles or blew them up and spent your time being wooed and or rescued by two hot men. It was all very cute and we loved you for it. By "Explosive Eighteen" you've been on the job for seventeen years and you're still broke and incompetent, but you're not so young anymore. What was once cute is starting to look like arrested development. I'm just saying.
And the Team Ranger and Team Morrelli thing is getting old faster than you are. Choose one already. And we all know it's not going to be Ranger so either put a ring on Morelli or move on.
Also, have you noticed how violent you've become? In this book alone you take on three different sets of armed men, one quite crazed and carrying a very big knife and a semi-automatic and another carrying a frikkin rocket launcher and you kick em, slice em, shock em and shoot em. Even for a girl from the Burg, that's extreme. So how come you still can't cuff an unarmed skip?
While you're thinking about that, I got one more thing I gotta know.
What's the secret with your hamster? I've never known a hamster live more than three years yet seventeen years later, yours is still living in the Campbells soup can on a diet of pop-tart crumbs. Now I'm a positive person, so I'd like to believe that you've found some exlixir of eternal hamster youth but that don't seem likely, so I gotta ask, when you leave your hamster at your mom's, are you sure you're always getting the same hamster back? I mean, you gotta wonder, don't ya?.
If you want to hear Lorelei King's perfect narration of "Explosive Eighteen", click on the SoundCloud link below.
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