The Kari AnnAlysis

Posts Tagged ‘janet evanovich’

The Full Box is a four-book audio set. I previously listened to and reviewed Full House here on KariAnnAlysis. It was one of the first audio books I listened to. I’ll always turn to Janet Evanovich when I need a good, light read. That’s why I was thrilled when I found the rest of this series in a complete box.

Here’s a short synopsis of each book:

Full Tilt: Jamie Swift’s newspaper is running on fumes. If something doesn’t turn around soon, she will have to stop the presses. Her silent partner Max Holt comes to town to lend her a helping hand, but he also brings more danger than has already hit Beaumont, SC. Someone is after Holt, most likely for his money, but he’s not the only one with a secret admirer. Frankie Fontana, former pro-wrestler, is running for mayor and he has also been receiving threats. In true Evanovich fashion, cars will explode, buildings will be blown up and a killer or two will be stopped in their tracks.

Full Speed: Things are heating up between Jamie and Max. They tracked down Fontana’s stalker, and got a track on Max’s….a popular minister who Max turned down for a deal. So Jamie and Max, separately, hit the road. Max wants to stop the minister in his tracks and Jamie wants to crack the story of a lifetime, with her new dog Fleas in the bed of her old jalopy truck. Jamie gets into character, and undercover, to get up close and personal with the man after her man.

Full Blast: The final book in the Full series doesn’t let down in the drama department. Jamie is back in Beaumont where a new, controversial lingerie store has opened in the very religious conservative town. Oh and aphrodisiac brownies are being sold at the local bakery. It seems love is in the air in Beaumont. But murder is also in the air and it all seems to lead back to Jamie’s new personals ads that she has started in the newspaper. So once again, she has to turn her journalistic powers on high so it’s not her newspaper making front page news!

My thoughts on this series are up and down like a roller coaster. I absolutely loved Full House. I loved the characters and the action. I expected more of Nick and Billie in the series, but did not get them. Instead, the books branch out to others in town. The only ones who make appearances in the rest of the books are Frankie and his wife DeeDee. They are a funny pair, but I wasn’t connected to them like I was Nick and Billie. I loved their chemistry and  hoped to follow up with them. I do like Jamie and Max. They are the traditional, fight against the odds, fight against the chemistry couple. When will people just start giving in and getting on with love?

I do love the action of this series and feel a connection with Jamie for her work in the journalism business.

Like all Evanovich books, the Full series keeps you turning pages. The books are fun and action packed and the thing I love about them the most is that Evanovich always thinks up the greatest, silliest characters that you can’t help but love and laugh with.

My favorite book in the series was definitely Full Blast. I loved the plot with the personals ads being the grounds for the murders, but also the little steamy side plots of the dirty little lingerie store and the brownies that make you go to a deep-dark dirty place. Oh it’s so dirty! I give Full Blast 5 bookmarks.

I give Full Tilt 4 bookmarks. I loved that characters from the previous book were brought back and the new ones that were brought to life. I loved the sexual tension between Jamie and Max. But the first book set such a high bar to follow.

And I give Full Speed 3 bookmarks. I didn’t hate this book, but I definitely didn’t love it as much as the others. Normally, I’m all about mobsters, but in this

On My Bookshelf is a weekly meme where you show off the goods you get each week. These can be books you bought, you borrowed, you got from the library, you downloaded, you won, you got from review. I think that covers it all. This meme was started by Kristi at The Story Siren. She actually calls it In My Mailbox, but I have an itty bitty mailbox and my things always get wet, so I ship them to work, so I renamed it because I’m compulsive like that.

Anyway, I got some goodies this week. The first two I downloaded on NetGalley after being contacted by a publicist. I am halfway through one and hope to buckle down and finish it today. The other, I have started, but put it aside when I realized which one I needed to review first.

From Goodreads.com:
The sausage maker’s youngest daughter is heading for the fight of her battle-scarred life. It’s the era of the counterculture and Vietnam. But twenty-four-year-old Kip Czermanksi is nowhere near her home in California. She’s in a jail cell in her hometown in Wisconsin awaiting a court appearance in the mysterious death of her ex-lover, who happened to be her brother-in-law. Given her father is the small town’s leading citizen; Kip isn’t overly worried, at first. But the personal grudge the DA holds for all the Czermanskis is about to find a foil Kip. What follows is a wild ride through Kip’s present predicament and her past. She’ll come to regret leaving her life in LA, regardless of the good reason for which she returned, when family dynamics and sibling rivalries, magnified by her counterculture attitudes and feminist beliefs, lay Kip’s life bare before the courtroom. Distrusting her legal team, her rebellious history well known, things both personal and legal spiral out-of-control. It doesn’t look good for Kip Czermanski.

 
In a time of hardship and heartbreak, sometimes, reality just isn’t enough. Slipping Reality is the story of fourteen-year-old Katelyn Emerson, who, when faced with the glaring reality of her brother’s illness, rebels against the truth by slipping away into the depths of her own imagination. There, she finds the kind of support and comfort she feels she deserves. There, she does not have to feel so alone. And yet, as Katelyn’s grasp on reality begins to unravel, so too does the story of a girl who grew up too fast and fell apart too soon. Emily Beaver’s debut novel is a coming of age story that deals with the trials of young grief, insight, and growth where it’s least expected.

I also had to get a new audio book this week from the library. Although  I have fallen in love with Mary Higgins-Clark’s mysteries, I needed something different. I have listened to three of hers in a row now. So, instead, I got something fun and light. This is The Full Box by Janet Evanovich and Charlotte Hughes. This is the complete “Full” series that the duo wrote. I listened to the first book, Full House , and really liked it and decided I’d just get the whole set and finish the series. I am almost done with Full Tilt and it is just as fun and action packed as the first book.

Did you get any goodies this week?? If so, what are they?

If Stephanie Plum didn’t have bad luck, she would have no luck at all. While some may think it’s good luck that Stephanie’s boss Vinnie has been kidnapped, Stephanie knows her family would never let her live it down if she didn’t bring him home.

So, on top of the FTA’s that Stephanie needs to capture to even buy groceries, she’s in charge of finding her sleaze ball boss. And of course he wasn’t just kidnapped by someone because of his good looks, it’s more of a money thing…and a mob thing.

Good luck, as always, Stephanie has a great cast to help out and with a little luck from her Uncle Pip’s lucky bottle, they may just get away from all of this alive, and with Vinnie alive (but is that what anyone really wants?)

Shooo….am I rested… A little bloggy break was definitely good for my soul. I’ve knocked out four books off my TBR list on my bookshelf, got some knitting done and some napping, especially in the last few days. But now it’s back to business, and what a better way than with Ms. Stephanie Plum? She has been one of my favorite characters since my mother-in-law and sister-in-law twisted my arm to read this series (they didn’t have to twist very hard). These books are hilarious and make me laugh from start to finish, with a little explosion every now and then to remind me Stephanie is a bounty hunter, not a comedian.

It’d been a while since I’d read a Plum novel, and I think I’m actually two behind now, but this book was just as great as all the other ones. And one of the things I like most about this series is that you can take a little break between them and still know what’s going on when you pick up the next one. It’s nice to know the background between Stephanie, Morelli and Ranger, but it’s not pertinent to enjoying the series.

This is a great series if you need a nice pick me up and a good laugh.

This book in particular has some great moments, from the hobbit convention, to the multiple explosions that aren’t all Stephanie’s fault for a change, to a sale of all the goods in the bonds office, to stink bombs…yes, stink bombs.

I give Sizzling Sixteen 5 bookmarks.

ISBN: 978-0312383305
Released: June 2010
Author Website
Kari bought this book

Oh and guess what? January 27 is the date for the movie, based on the first book in this series, to come out. Yay! Katherine Heigl plays Stephanie Plum. It looks fun!! When you click above on Janet Evanovich’s website link (which I know you always do), you can watch the trailer. I am so excited!

From  Amazon: Wealthy newspaper owner and horseman Nick Kaharchek meets divorced mom Billie Pearce when she makes polo lessons at his stables part of her summer self-improvement program.

Though she’s hopeless at polo, Billie is so cute that Nick begins to invent excuses to spend time with her. First, he takes care of her when a horse steps on her foot; then, he arranges for his nutty cousin Deedee, a self-absorbed airhead, to board with Billie while her kids are away.

As if that isn’t enough, Billie must also contend with a bomb-setting teenager, professional wrestlers, an outbreak of spiders and threats from a mysterious intruder.
I hate having to take a book summary from Amazon. I tried to write this one almost a dozen times and it just wasn’t coming. There was so much going on in this book, I couldn’t boil it down to just a couple of sentences.

I have been a fan of Janet Evanovich for years and her books never fail to please me. I started listening to audiobooks recently and ran across this Evanovich book. I hadn’t read this series and though it’d be a good one to listen to, rather than read. It was a very good decision.

There’s not many authors that make me laugh out loud while I’m reading/listening to their books. Evanovich does that in every single book of hers that I get into. Evanovich doesn’t have to make a new world and write a fiction book that is so completely out of this world and unbelievable for you to fall in love with her work. A lot of my favorite authors have moved up the list for those reasons. I always respect the authors that can do this and I want to get inside their mind. But Evanovich keeps it simple and it’s just as magical. All of her books could be reality, hilarious reality and that garners my respect as well.

I give Full House 5 bookmarks and can’t wait to listen to the rest of the series.

ISBN: 978-0312983277
Published: September 2002 (Originally written in 1989)
Author Website
Kari got this audio book from the Cabell County, WV Library

So I’ve always been a book lover, that’s no secret, even if you’ve just stopped by here once or twice. But it takes me a while to get used to new forms of reading. It took me a long time to warm up to the idea of having an e-reader. Now I’ve had my Nook for about a year and I LOVE IT! I can not only read whatever I can get my grubby hands on from Barnes and Noble, I can also read my NetGalley books, which is a huge leap from reading them on my laptop.

This weekend, but pal Jessica posted that she got her first audio book. I had heard of these strange critters before, but never tested the waters. Around the same time, a Twitter pal told me that he listened to 3-4 audio books a year. I told him I had never tried one and he told me I was doing a disservice to you, my readers, because I could have that many more reviews on my blog each month. That did it for me!

The next day on my lunch break, I strolled to the Cabell County Library. I have a card there, like I do for a couple of other local libraries, but had never used it. It took me a second to get my bearings and find the audio books, then the fiction audio books. But once I did, I was in Heaven. I found some authors that I knew of and some books of theirs I hadn’t tried.

I ended up picking up The Host by Stephanie Meyer. I read the Twilight series by her and enjoyed it, so thought I would try something else. I also picked up Full House by Janet Evanovich. We all know my love for her, so this was a given when I found a series that I had not read by her.

Now I drive 88 miles a day, so you better believe I am getting some good listening in. I’ve start The Host and in hind sight, that probably wasn’t a good idea. It’s a little heavy at points, talking about souls and getting them into hosts and the different kinds of hosts. I was a little confused, trying to focus on what was going on through the prolouge, but eased into it after that.

One thing I have noticed is that my mind wanders. When that happens and I am reading a physical book, I can just look away from the book until my mind clears then restart. When I am listening to an audio book however, I have to go back to the beginning of the track and see what I’ve missed. I’ve had to do this a couple of times already. I think I may want to consider keeping the books that I listen to as light books, or even mysteries that aren’t going to take me doing a lot of comprehending. I need all attention on the road at all times.

I do want to look into some non fiction books. I know that Tori Spelling voices all of her audio books. Those are going on my list. And I may see if Chelsea Handler has audio books.

Do you listen to audio books? Do you listen to the same genre you read?