Book Review: Ten Big Ones

Ten Big Ones by Janet Evanovich (St. Martin's Press 2004)

Review: This series doesn’t have far to go. The recurring characters have already been stretched in all directions, so they are risking a loss of credibility (only risking?) if they go much further. The secondary characters are beginning to look familiar. The situations that would in the early books have been almost unbearably tense are now taken in almost without a thought; this is a series, after all, and a popular one, so the author’s not going to let anything happen to one of her main characters, right?
     Beside all this—and that is really the question, isn’t it? whether one can see past this?—Ten Big Ones is a decent book. It’s not tears-running-down-your-face funny like One for the Money. And it’s not scary as hell like that same book, whose Benito Ramirez is perhaps the best [i.e. worst] bad guy in romantic fiction ever. The romantic triangle between Stephanie, Morelli and Ranger might be better in this installment than it has been lately, but it leads one to wonder how much longer any of them will have the patience for it.
     The only actual "analysis" of this book that I'm going to give is to say that if you’ve read 1-9, then you’ll like 10, too. I laughed my ass off through the last several chapters. (There’s a scene involving a needle that killed me.) Something about which I’d been curious for a while was revealed. And the title makes sense. But if this was the first book of hers that I’d read, I can’t say with certainty that I’d read more, and it sucks to say that. I'd rate it a 7, based as much on my expectations of what this could have been as for some sort of "objective" reading of the actual book.
     I think it's time for the series to end.