Veronica Mars Goes Literary - Sort of - For "The Thousand-Dollar Tan Line"

The Thousand-Dollar Tan Line - Rob Thomas and Jennifer Graham

Unless you've been hiding under a rock, you know that Veronica Mars lives, thanks to a Kickstarter campaign to fund Kristen Bell’s return as a slightly older version of the sassy high schooler whose hobby is being a private eye. The diminutive blonde made it back to Neptune, California, for the movie – and stayed for the book. According to the cover blurb, The Thousand-Dollar Tan Line is “the first book in a thrilling new mystery series”!

Kristen Bell at San Diego Comicon, by Gage Skidmore

Your reviewer begs to differ: first in a series, yes; mystery, maybe; thrilling, decidedly an overstatement. Read on…

It’s March, and hordes of spring-breaking college students have descended on seaside Neptune, filling the motel rooms, jamming the bars and leaving the village streets littered with dead soldiers and pools of vomit. You know the drill… When one party girl disappears, however, national attention is focused on the annual three weeks of hedonism. Everyone in Neptune knows their elected sheriff is a corrupt buffoon, so the local Chamber of Commerce quietly turn to Mars Investigations – and right now, that’s Veronica.



VM goes undercover (if you consider an itsy-bitsy pink string bikini “undercover”) to investigate the mansion where the girl was partying just before she dropped off the radar. Oops… sinister Hispanics toting lots of weapons: can you say “cartel”? That same night, another pretty missy disappears from the same party house – and this one is connected to Veronica… don’t ask. The waters are muddied by red herrings galore and lathered with extraneous plot threads before our heroine figures out what anyone who watches TV crime drama knows: a flat character knows more than s/he is saying…

Ostensibly penned by Rob Thomas, creator of the original television series, The Thousand-Dollar Tan Line (there’s no hyphen on the cover, but there is one on the title page: go figure…) was apparently ghosted by Jennifer Graham, who gets second billing. According to online buzz, the book picks up where the movie left off, with Daddy Mars recovering from injuries suffered in the final reel and boyfriend Logan off on an aircraft carrier somewhere.

"Marshmallows," as cultish fans of the series (and movie) are wont to call themselves eagerly lap this stuff up (witness several hundred five-star reviews at the river). Marshmallow is an apt description, given that the mystery novel, like the confection, is light and fluffy and borders at times on the sickly sweet. While the protagonist is now in her late twenties, young-adult themes are still prominent – it’s pretty much a high-school saga transplanted to the tenth class reunion (apparently the plot of the 2014 Mars movie). You got your anti-authoritarian bent, your older-people-are-stupid trope, your chaste-yearning plotline. It’s apparently the subgenre some would call “new adult fiction,” whatever that is.

No matter how well The Thousand-Dollar Tan Line (with or without the hyphen) honors the Veronica Mars canon, to actually be worthy of those five stars it must succeed as if there had never been a teenage blonde detective on TV. When it comes to that, the novel fails: it’s too clearly written as if it were a television treatment, chucky-jam full of tropes and draped with extraneous plot taradiddles, as well as all the obvious breaks for commercials. Worst of all, anyone who watches crime dramas on television knows that the villain will be a flat character who shows up one time too many – and that’s exactly what happens here.

Writing a mystery requires some forethought, and there appears to have been none where this one's concerned. Fans of the TV series will certainly love it because all the teens are there, though they're now pushing 30. Real live mystery fans, on the other hand, should avoid it.

Edited to add: real live mystery fans should also avoid the second in the series, Mr. Kiss and Tell