Two for the Dough - Janet Evanovich

Here I was ten minutes from finishing my long run on Saturday and the book ends. No more distraction. And really, these books so far have been a wonderful distraction for me as I train for yet another half marathon. 

Two for the Dough begins where One for the Money left off (read my review here). Stephanie Plum is not quite such a novice bounty hunter, although she still has a lot of room to improve. She kind of bumbles around irritating criminals and police alike. Detective Joe Morelli is back and the chemistry between him and Stephanie has increased. It's fun to anticipate these two getting together. They fight, they flirt, he left her handcuffed to a shower curtain last time around, this time she leaves him pantless on the side of the road. You know, tit for tat with these two. 

Ranger makes a few small appearances. And Grandma Massur is back and doing ride alongs with Stephanie. I did miss some of the people I got used to being around in the first book, like her cousin's husband Eddy Gazarra, but LuLu is back and she's working with Stephanie now and keeping her in the books was a hugely wise move I think. She may have been a hooker in the first book, but now she's a file clerk for the bond agency and she's the only one there with street smarts. This all made much more sense to me because once upon a time a few years ago I read #15 in this series and while I don't think I needed to read all the previous books to understand the plot, reading these does have a lot more payoff with character development over such a long series). This book actually made me laugh out loud a couple of times and I found it funnier than the first, even if the plot didn't move quite as briskly. 

In this one, Stephanie is looking for Kenny Mancuso (I apologize for mispelling any names here, I don't know how they are spelled since I only listen to the audio books). Mancuso is Morelli's cousin and just happened to shoot his best friend in the knee cap. Stephanie wants to find him because it means basically a month's paycheck for one guy. As Morelli says, she does have a knack for running into her marks. She happens upon Kenny several times. 

The story weaves in some conspiracy with coffins and some missing guns. I can say that I put this one together pretty quickly so I felt a bit smarter than Stephanie in the end. So the mystery part of the story could be a little tighter. However, for a running distraction, this book was the perfect fit.

4/5 Stars.