Janet Evanovich can certainly write an entertaining (and compelling) read. I’m not saying she’s an Austen or Bronte, but her novels are full of laugh-out-loud moments – racy and pacy as a friend says.
Here’s the blurb …
Seven Stones of Power
No one knows when they were created or by whom, each said to represent one of the Seven Deadly Sins.
For centuries, treasure hunters have been eager to possess the Stones, undeterred by their corrupting nature. The list is long – Genghis Khan, Alexander the Great, Napoleon, to name a few. Now the Stones have found their way to Salem, Massachusetts, and so has Gerwulf Grimoire, adding himself to this rogue’s gallery of power seekers. He’s an uncommonly dangerous man with a hunger for the forbidden and a set of abilities that is way beyond ordinary. Abilities that he feels entitle him to possess anything he might desire.
That would include Elizabeth Tucker, the woman he needs to find the Stones. She’s freshly transplanted from New York City to Boston’s North Shore. With a new job as a Pastry Chef at Dazzle’s Bakery and an old house inherited from her Aunt Ophelia, her life is pretty much on track … until it’s suddenly derailed by a man named Diesel, a rude monkey and a ninja cat.
Lizzy can handle the monkey and the cat. She’s not sure about Diesel. He’s offering up his own set of unusual talents and promising to protect her from Grimoire, the kind of protection that Lizzy suspects might involve guarding her body day and night.
The Seven Deadly Sins are pride, greed, lust, envy, wrath, sloth and gluttony. That pretty much covers everything that is wicked. Diesel thinks it also pretty much covers everything that’s fun. And Lizzy thinks Diesel and the Seven Deadly Sins cover everything her mother warned her about.
In this novel Evanovich embarks on a whole new series (Seven I imagine given the ‘Seven Stones of Power’) with a new heroine and a new setting. Elizabeth Tucker lives in Marblehead and makes exceptionally good cupcakes. Our hero, Diesel, we’ve met before in the Stephanie Plum between the numbers novels; he has special powers and his job is policing other people with special powers.
Elizabeth is an unmentionable (i.e she has special powers); she can locate special objects like the stones of power (and her amazing cupcakes might also be part of her power). Only two people in the world have this talent – her and a strange man who lives in Florida. Gerwulf (called Wulf for short), an evil and scary man who kills people by burning them with his hands, wants all of the stones so that he can create hell on earth. Diesel wants to find the Stones and hand them over to BUM (Board of Unmentionable Marshalls). What follows is a riotous romp involving, a one-eyed cat, a monkey, explosions, gluttony of various different kinds (food, punishment, etc), spells gone wrong (performed by Glo, Elizabeth’s work colleague, – the Lula of this series) and a bit of sexual tension. Apparently unmentionables can’t have sex because one of them will lose their powers.
If you like the Stephanie Plum novels, then you will enjoy this one.