Book Review: Wicked Appetite

I was in my local book store, a magical place with towers of books, reading cubbies, and comfortable chairs. I found a book that I had been wanting to reread, Wicked Appetite by Janet Evanovich. Wicked Business was sitting in my library holding queue waiting to be processed and then delivered to my branch, but I was hazy on the details from the first book, and so when it magically popped into my hands I decided it was fate and purchased Wicked Appetite after tearing myself from its pages.

Even though I had already devoured it once, Wicked Appetite had me giggling all over again. Lizzy Tucker has just finally gotten her life in order. After graduating from culinary school, where she discovered an unnatural gift in baking cupcakes, Lizzy tried to make life work as a chef in NYC. But when she inherits her great aunt’s house in Marblehead, she decides to move and starts working at a small bakery, loving her life and her new home. Then Diesel shows up.

Diesel is a cross over character from Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum series where he shows up in the four holiday novels. Diesel has unnatural supernatural abilities, he is able to find anyone and he can unlock anything. Even bras, stealing them from unsuspecting women. People with unnatural abilities are called Unmentionables. Diesel is on the hunt for supernatural stones, each embodied with one of the seven deadly sins, and he need’s Lizzy’s help. Lizzy is also an Unmentionable, to her surprise. She has the preternatural ability to identify if an object has power, and Diesel needs her help in located the stones. Along with Carl the monkey and a one-eyed cat, Lizzy and Diesel must battle Wulf and his minion (a LARPer of medieval variety who cant distinguish fantasy from fiction) to recover the hidden stone representing Gluttony.

My mother was going to get a monkey, until she read that you basically have a two-year old for life.
By Rob from Cambridge, MA (flickr.com) via Wikimedia Commons

In pure Evanovich form, Lizzy is both likable and funny. Crazy characters, such as her no-nonsense boss who owns the bakery and her co-worker Gloria who is determined to find her latent wizardry abilities, abound in this series rounding out a fun plot with interesting players. I like Lizzy, she is smart and funny, tries to resist Diesel’s charms and puts up with a monkey and a ninja cat. I particularly liked the use of Diesel from the Stephanie Plum series, because I am a huge fan of cross overs. It was fun to read about a new setting and I enjoyed the treasure hunting aspects of the book.

Evanovich books are always a fun, light read with nothing too serious lasting for long. Though Lizzy and Stephanie share some similar characteristics of gullibility and humor, the characters are different enough to keep the Wicked series separate from the Plum series. Evanovich always makes me laugh out loud with each of her books, and I pick them up for the express purpose of a giggle and escapism. She is one of the few authors who remains funny as a series progresses and I appreciate that about her books. I do get tired of will-they or wont-they relationships, but I forgive the author since she makes me laugh so hard.

Read another review here, here, and here.

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