More Plum please

Last month I reviewed One for the money by Janet Evanovich, the first in her Stephanie Plum mystery series. Being presented with Two for the dough, and yet more Stephanie by a Plum-loving friend as a Christmas treat was wonderful.

Two for the dough is every bit as good as the first novel and is even funnier. Stephanie Plum, Trenton's most unlikely bounty-hunter continues to track down the bad guys. Life is getting more complicated as body-parts and coffins disappear from funeral parlours, and illegal guns from an Army base flood the streets. Surely they can't be connected?

As though life isn't hard enough, Stephanie's Grandma Mazur (one of my all-time favourite characters) has decided that age is no barrier to bounty-hunting, but can Stephanie solve the mystery, avoid falling in love with Joe Morelli, stop Grandma Mazur from getting herself killed, and save Rex the hamster from being used as a hamster shield?

It manages both to be an effective mystery story and hilariously funny. It was described in The Times Literary Supplement as "an entertaining parody of the hard-boiled American crime novel"; it's something that Evanovich does superbly. I love Stephanie Plum.