Just finished To The Nines by Janet Evanovich. The first and last book of the series (I did another in the sequence as abridged audio on my recent trip to Phoenix; I did the book to check the real series.)

Evanovich has a way with dialogue. Her plots are more from the thriller genre than the mystery genre, as she doesn’t require anyone to do much thinking. For example, as soon as she introduced the evidence for the existence of the WebMaster in this book, I knew the rest of the story. It wasn’t at all hard to see who the main villain was, and I ended up cursing the supposedly intelligent characters in the book for not recognizing something so obvious right away. The remainder of the plot required the good guys collectively act like idiots for the remainder of the book.

Between that and the annoying characters she’s populated her world with, there’s every reason for me to avoid stopping by here again. Even though Lula did manage to discover the major drawback to the Atkins diet (there’s blessed little to crunch on in it) I really never want to meet up with her again. Life’s too short to spend it with characters who make you wince.

And that’s the bottom line. I cringed often in this book, mainly at the characterizations of ethnic minorities, but at other points as well.