Metro Girl (Alex Barnaby Series #1)
by Janet Evanovich
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Book Summary Information
Author: Janet EvanovichEdition: Mass Market Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2005-09-27
ISBN: 0060584025
Number of pages: 384
Publisher: HarperTorch
Book Reviews of Metro Girl (Alex Barnaby Series #1)
Book Review: Laughing all the way to the bank.
Summary: 1 Stars
That is what I believe Janet Evanovich and her publisher are now doing at the expense of her readers.
I've read all Janet Evanovich's books, the Plum series, ones co-authored with Charlotte Hughes and the early books written under the Pseudonym Steffie Hall. It is sad to relate that Metro Girl is Evanovich's weakest and most poorly written work to date. I doubt whether people will buy the sequel, Motor Mouth. If Metro Girl had been published without Evanovich's name on, I would have thought it was an Evanovich spoof written by a high-school amateur writer.
This book is not about NASCAR racing, however the word appears over and over again, using when Sam Hooker refers to himself as NASCAR guy. For example in chapter two, out of consecutive 28 words, the word NASCAR appears 5 times.
Barney dresses like a 1980s Barbie doll. Bleached blond hair and pink clothes, which are either tight or short, or both. Plus she wears a pink ball cap - the only women who wear a pink ball cap in 2005 live in retirement communities.
Ok, we will suspend belief and accept the convoluted and ludicrous plot threads. However the characters are hard to like, nor did I care about whether they triumphed in the end.
Barney is a not so bright woman from Baltimore, who refers to people whose names she doesn't know as Puke Face, or other childish terms. Barney looks slutty, talks like a 14 year old, but we are meant to believe she is actually an adult, an experienced, fantastic mechanic, who has a lifestyle where she can just drop everything to fly from Baltimore to Florida because she hears a woman scream in the background of a telephone conversation with her brother. She doesn't try and contact anyone in Florida first, just gets on an airplane.
I guess Barney could be described as a more juvenile version of Stephanie Plum, but lacks the warmth and humor. She links up with a total jerk who she has never met before to find her brother.
The "NASCAR guy" character could have been lifted from a 1970s really low budget or porn movie. He's a narcissistic and really annoying version of Morelli, but where we can understand that a woman would want someone like Morelli is their life, no woman, sane or otherwise, would want to meet NASCAR guy more than once. Morelli makes choices because they are the right thing to do, and sometimes because he is a man. NASCAR guy's reason to help is to get his boat back, oh and of course get Barney naked. I wondered if his crassness was meant to be ironic, but I don't think so, it just goes to show how out of touch Janet Evanovich is when writing characters in their late 20's to mid 30's. To illustrate, at one point NASCAR guy gets a dress for Barney. Not only is it still warm from the previous owner, it is, in Barney's own words, wait for it, "silver metallic with some spandex. It had a V-neck that plunged halfway to my doodah, and the skirt fell two inches below my ass". Yes, she wore it to go around the clubs and meanwhile got drunk. Was this book actually written by Janet Evanovich, or was it ghost written by a dirty old man with a box of Kleenex, dreaming of his hedonistic days at the Playboy mansion during 1970's?
Of course Evanovich always has a gun-toting senior in her books, in case Rosa, a Cuban cigar roller, and her presence, and that of the gay guy and his dog is there for cheap laughs and to provide Evanovich's quota of stereotypes.
I bought the hardback version and there is lots of white space to make the book look longer. If you took out the references to NASCAR guy and the sterotypes, and just leave the tangled and implausible plot lines and dialogue the book would be about 75% shorter.
At best a high school student's attempt at writing.
If you want to read Metro Girl or the sequel Motor Mouth, I'd suggest you get them from the library or buy for 1 cent by Amazon or ebay resellers. It is not worth spending your money on a new book.
Summary of Metro Girl (Alex Barnaby Series #1)
Alexandra (Barney) Barnaby roars onto the Miami Beach scene in hot pursuit of her missing baby brother, "Wild" Bill. Leave it to the maverick of the family to get Barney involved with high-speed car chases, a search for sunken treasure, and Sam Hooker, a NASCAR driver who?s good at revving a woman's engine.
Engaged in a deadly race, Bill has "borrowed" Hooker's sixty-five-foot Hatteras and sailed off into the sunset...just when Hooker has plans for the boat. Hooker figures he'll attach himself to Barney and maybe run into scumbag Bill. And better yet, maybe he'll get lucky in love with Bill's sweetie pie sister.
The pedal will have to go to metal if Barney and Hooker want to be the first to cross the finish line, save Bill, Hooker's boat...and maybe the world.
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