Steph Dodges a Bullet - and Other Stuff - for Top Secret Twenty-One

Top Secret Twenty-One - Janet Evanovich

She’s up to twenty-one now, and she’s still a ditz – but she’s a ditz who somehow manages to get results. She’s Trenton’s favorite bond recovery agent, the one and only Stephanie Plum. If she’s coming for you, you’d better watch out (and put your clothes back on…)

The skip of the week is sleazeball car dealer Jimmy Poletti, charged with “importing underage girls from Mexico” (no further details available – after all, this isn’t a courtroom drama). Poletti’s former bookkeeper (maybe I should say “bookcooker”?), little person Randy Briggs has attached himself to Steph for some reason, all three feet-zero of him. Poletti’s in the wind, but his poker-playing buddies keep turning up leaking blood from numerous holes and things around Briggs keep exploding. Weird, huh?

Meanwhile, Ranger’s business is on high alert as a one-eyed Russian mercenary, with whom Carlos Manoso has a messy history, is in town looking for revenge. Even as Steph and her crew forage through the wilds of Stark Street looking for Poletti and a few other FTAs, the cyclops is out there with a sharp knife and some deadly goodies. But never fear: Stephanie Plum always gets her man… whether it’s Ranger or Morelli!

Tribalism in 1970s Atlanta: Karin Slaughter's "Cop Town"

Cop Town - Karin Slaughter

Atlanta, Georgia, 1975: it's a city undergoing change, but not in every department. The cop shop may be the worst, awash with good ol' boys who still think the darkies should stay in their place and that a woman is only good for one thing - and that thing certainly ain't police work. As Cop Town opens, the fifth policeman in recent weeks lies bleeding to death, shot by the hand known only as The Shooter. 

Into this steaming morass steps newly-minted patrol officer Kate Murphy, a gorgeous and marvelously stacked woman with two big secrets: one, she's a widow and two, she's not Irish. She was born Kaitlyn Herschel, Dutch and - gasp - Jewish.  Murphy's new partner is the brother of the man whose patrol partner bled out on page one, and the niece of the goodest and oldest of those good old boys that run the station house. As Murphy struggles to bear up under the avalanche of harassment, she learns that even her sisters in arms won't be much help. Yet it's the novice investigator who discovers The Shooter's pattern - and it's the rookie who just might be his next victim.

"Irreparable Harm" - Lightweight Legal Fluff from Melissa F. Miller, Esq.

Irreparable Harm - Melissa F. Miller

Meet Sasha McCandless, Russo-Irish-American lawyer for what pretty much has to be the only white-shoe firm in Pittsburgh, PA. When one of the firm’s biggest clients, a hometown airline, suffers a major incident; Sasha’s on the case like white on rice. Little does she know that an evil tech guru brought down the company’s airliner with a bit of electronic wizardry and some good old-fashioned chicanery. As Sasha sashays from office to courtroom to suburban DC, along the way she picks up an Asian-American air marshal and a posse of Ukrainian hitters who’ve somehow figured out that she knows too much. Luckily for Sasha, the 5-foot-0 97-pound lawyer found time during all those 80-hour work weeks every lawyer (supposedly) works to become world-class in krav maga, capable of disarming and beating up not just big goons but also trained lawmen. Must be nice…

Book One of Another "I Won't Read Book Two" Trilogy -- The Park Service

The Park Service - Ryan Winfield

Aubrey van Houten’s is your average post-apocalyptic world, one in which the last surviving humans live in a manmade cavern several kilometers below the surface. Space and resources are limited, so their society has made “adjustments.” The citizens come of age at fifteen, at which time an algorithm assigns them their careers based on a day-long test. But wait: they get to retire at thirty-five! Except that retirement means they’re sent to Eden… apparently some sort of “cloud storage” of their minds. All that and algae crisps at every meal…

With his father just weeks from retirement, Aubrey turns fifteen and receives his (yes, Aubrey’s a boy) assignment; the first person in memory sent up to level I. But on the way to his assignment, the maglev train crashes and Aubrey finds himself both miraculously alive and on the park-like surface of the world he’d always been told was a radioactive ruin. Lie #1… And there are other humans on the surface, too – but they live in hiding, in constant fear of “the Park Service.” As Aubrey learns when a Park Service drone murders an entire community, they’ve been hiding for good reason. But Aubrey will come to find that everything he learned as a child comprises lies #2 through about #1,000,000 – and the hits just keep on coming.