Winter Preview 2014-2015: Part Eight

All those World War II and atmospheric crime novels I'm planning to read this winter need to be leavened with some good old-fashioned "entertainments," as Graham Greene used to call his not-so-serious writings. Luckily, it looks there will be plenty on hand.

UK cover on the left, US on the right.
As usual, the UK cover is lots better

Did you see the 2009 film An Education, about a young woman growing up too fast in England as the country transitioned from the austerity of the 1950s to the Swinging 60s? One of the striking things about that movie was its sense of that particular time and place. The novelist Nick Hornby wrote the screenplay, and if the description of his upcoming book, Funny Girl (Riverhead Hardcover, February 3), is anything to go by, he had a lot of that sensibility still inhabiting his brain after the screenplay was finished.

It's 1964, and young Barbara Parker decides that winning Miss Blackpool would doom her to a year of dreary local ribbon-cutting ceremonies, much too long to wait to go to London to make her fortune. So she refuses the tiara and heads off, hoping to emulate her idol, Lucille Ball. In fairly short order, she wins the lead in a BBC sitcom called Barbara (and Jim), about a young couple's married life. Hornby takes Barbara (screen-named Sophie Straw) and the creative characters behind the show through their personal comedies and tragedies, all the way up until the present.

I'm reading that the book includes a mix of real history and fiction, and has a selection of black-and-white photographs that lend it a little of the feel of a sort of celebrity bio or TV history. Word also is that it's both hilarious and touching, as the characters experience sudden celebrity and what happens after.

Another character looks back on a long and eventful life in Alison Jean Lester's Lillian on Life (Putnam Adult, January 13). Even though I claim to be cynical about authors' blurbs, I have to admit that this first caught my eye when one of my favorite authors, Kate Atkinson, wrote: "I absolutely loved Lillian on Life. It was a delight . . . so fresh and clever."

In this debut novel, Lillian is born to a stereotypical staid midwestern family in the 1930s, but leaves convention behind, as she samples men and cultures around the country and the world. I like the idea that the story isn't told as a straight chronology, but as a series of 24 life lessons, told with wry humor and a determination to avoid regret. I'm not at all sure I'll like Lillian, but I do like character studies and she definitely looks like quite a character.

Speaking of characters, how about the late columnist Dorothy Parker? I was recently reading the book Bohemians, Bootleggers, Flappers, and Swells: The Best of Early Vanity Fair (Penguin, October 2014) and giggling over her "Hate Songs" pieces on men, actresses, relatives and the office. That put me in the mood for more.

Author Ellen Meister decided that Dorothy Parker should never die, so she decided to imagine that Parker lives on, as a feisty ghost residing at her old drinking and rapier-wit-wielding place, the Algonquin Hotel. Book One was 2013's Farewell, Dorothy Parker. But it wasn't a farewell, because the ghost of Dorothy Parker will return in Dorothy Parker Drank Here (Putnam Adult, February 24).

This time around, Dorothy will buttonhole Algonquin resident Ted Shriver, who is a reclusive resident waiting to die of cancer, which he refuses to have treated. Shriver has no will to live since his brilliant writing career was derailed years before by a charge of plagiarism. Dorothy will team up with TV producer Norah Wolfe to try to keep Shriver among the living. I've only seen one early review, but it says the book is full of heart, wit, suspense and compassion, so it seems like just the ticket for a gloomy midwinter day.

And speaking of characters who drink––a lot––Stewart O'Nan's West of Sunset (Viking Adult, January 13) takes on F. Scott Fitzgerald during the last three years of his life. His career was decrepit, Fitzgerald had ruined his health, Zelda was in a sanitarium, and in 1937 he grabbed one last chance by heading to Hollywood to be a screenwriter.

The Hollywood studios in the late 1930s and early 1940s produced some of my very favorite films (The Philadelphia Story, Holiday, The Wizard of Oz, Gone With the Wind, Rebecca), which means that I'm anxious to read this even though I've never been much of a Fitzgerald fan. Still, advance reviewers say it's an insightful novelization of the waning years of Fitzgerald's life, which were nothing like the Jazz Age period. And if I also get to read about Louis B. Mayer, Humphrey Bogart and––hey!––even Dorothy Parker in La-La Land, I'm happy.

I have some trepidation about Laurie R. King's 13th Mary Russell/Sherlock Holmes book, Dreaming Spies (Bantam, February 24). I practically hurled the 11th book in the series, Pirate King, across the room in sheer frustration. Holmes was barely a presence, and Mary on her own was so boring, with her complaining and humorless self-satisfaction that I decided that was the end of my reading in the series. But I have some friends who said the next book, Garment of Shadows, was much better. What pushes me toward wanting to read this one is that the title is a play on Matthew Arnold's reference to Oxford as a city of "dreaming spires." I'm a complete sucker for Oxford-based mysteries.

The story of Dreaming Spies is apparently set not only in Oxford, but also in Japan. This visit to Japan is alluded to in a couple of earlier books, but this is the first time readers will learn exactly what Russell and Holmes got up to in that faraway land in 1924. Word is that it involves a blackmailing English lord and ninjas. Yes, ninjas. Will this 13th story in the series be a lucky 13? The proof will be in the reading.

One of my favorite Golden Age mysteries is Delano Ames's She Shall Have Murder, the first in a delightful series featuring Jane and Dagobert Brown, who are a sort of English Nick and Nora Charles. Compared to the Charleses, the Browns drink fewer martinis and more tea, but they get up to just as much silliness. In this first book, Jane Hamish is not yet married and is working in one of those classic English village law offices, where all the law you need to know is in the head of the senior partner, and the tea cart will be coming around any minute.

When spinster client Mrs. Robjohn is found dead from a gas leak in her home, the underemployed Dagobert Brown, Jane's intended, refuses to believe it's an accident and decides to investigate, dragooning a reluctant Jane into his sleuthing. It's a delightful story, with its charming characters and evocative description of the austerity of Britain shortly after World War II.

Delightful as the story is, why am I mentioning this old chestnut in the context of a book preview? Simple. Manor Minor Press has just republished the book with new cover art and annotations that add depth to the story. For example, I now know what Veganins and Melachrinos are, along with the full explanation of that British Double Summer Time I've seen mentioned in so many period British mysteries.

Another protagonist who is equal parts entertaining and exasperating is Don Tillman, first met in Graeme Simsion's The Rosie Project, which I reviewed here. Don is an Australian genetics professor who resembles The Big Bang Theory's Sheldon Cooper, only with a lot more interest in sex. In The Rosie Project, Don's Wife Project, in which he attempts to find a mate via a rigorously designed requirements questionnaire, becomes tangled up in the Father Project, wherein he agrees to help barmaid/student Rosie identify her biological father.

I don't want to spoil The Rosie Project for you, but in the upcoming The Rosie Effect (Simon & Schuster, December 30), Don and Rosie are married and have moved to New York, where he is a visiting professor at Columbia and she is a medical student. Don has loosened up some of his strict rules for living to accommodate the more spontaneous and flexible Rosie, since he has concluded that, despite her failure to achieve a passing grade on his Wife Project questionnaire, she is the world's most perfect woman.

But when Rosie announces she is pregnant, Don is knocked for a loop. The amount of research involved in optimal pregnancy diet and exercise, successful parenthood and the best infant equipment is daunting enough, but a series of calamities result when Rosie repeatedly fails to be a cooperative subject and the rest of the world just doesn't get Don's spirit of scientific inquiry, as when he decides to spend long periods of time on a park bench observing small children in a playground and making notes.

I had the opportunity to read an advance copy of The Rosie Effect and, while it has a little of the bloat you always seem to see in the sequel to a runaway best-seller, and it doesn't achieve the same heights of inspired lunacy as The Rosie Project, it still gave me a few chuckles. It might be something that would cheer you up if you're a little under the weather after New Year's Eve.

Is it appropriate to look forward to a new book in a series when I still haven't read the first one? I was so excited about William Shaw's She's Leaving Home last year (originally published in the UK as A Song from Dead Lips) that I bought it right away, but it's still there on my e-reader. I find that's the problem with e-books; too easy to lose track of them.

Shaw's series features Detective Sergeant Cathal Breen and temporary Detective Constable Helen Tozer of London's Metropolitan Police in the Swinging 60s. It wasn't all rock-and-roll and miniskirts. The force was openly sexist and racist, and there were plenty of bent coppers. Crime rates were high; fraud and corruption were more the rule than the exception.

Life on the force can be hard for Breen, with his Irish heritage, and far harder for Helen. In Kings of London (Mulholland, January 27), Breen finds a death threat in his work pigeonhole and is met with indifference about the finding of a mutilated body thought to be a homeless man. The interest level changes when another body is found, this time the son of a powerful politician. The politician wants results, but the prominent don't want any publicity that could possibly harm them.

The more I look at the reviews of the books in this series, the harder I shake my head at my failure to read the first book yet. This looks like a gritty, stylish rendering of a past that's not so distant but is still a different world.

If you're a regular reader of Read Me Deadly, you know that I just love everything Veronica Mars. The TV show, the movie, and the book The Thousand-Dollar Tan Line that came out earlier this year. I'm even a devotée of the commercials that Kristen Bell is doing with her real-life husband, actor Dax Shepard, for Samsung. Check out their cute and funny Christmas ad here.

Veronica will be sleuthing again in Rob Thomas's Mr. Kiss and Tell (Vintage Paperback Original, January 20). As fans know, the Neptune Grand hotel has been the scene of all manner of sins, from adultery to blackmail to murder. For the fanciest hotel in town, it sure has its seamy side!

Now, a woman complains that she was brutally assaulted in the hotel, smuggled out and dumped in a field, left for dead. The hotel hires Mars Investigations (i.e., Veronica, her father Keith, and their electronics savant, Mac) to investigate the woman's story. But the hotel isn't a terribly cooperative client; they refuse to turn over their reservation list, for example. Surveillance video has key gaps, the victim refuses to identify who she was supposed to meet at the hotel, and other witnesses seem to be hiding information too.

One of the strengths of the Veronica Mars world is its clear-eyed gaze on corruption in a town with a wide gap between rich and poor. The police force is usually responsive only to the powerful, and it takes Mars Investigations and its few allies in the force and the courts to get any form of justice. Early readers say that Veronica's usual cynicism about Neptune is in full force and that we see plenty of our other favorite characters, including Veronica's old biker buddy Weevil and love interest Logan. This looks like just what I'll need in the bleak midwinter.

Note: I received free review copies of The Rosie Effect and She Shall Have Murder.

Fall Preview 2014: Part Six

Veronica Mars, my favorite young detective, has been around a lot in 2014, first in a movie and then in The Thousand Dollar Tan Line novel. (I wrote about the movie and the book here.) She'll be back soon, in Rob Thomas's second Veronica Mars novel, Mr. Kiss and Tell (Vintage, October 28).

Those of us who watched the Veronica Mars series know the Neptune Grand hotel very well. For the fanciest spot in town, it's sure been the scene of plenty of low-down deeds, and now we have another. A woman comes forward, claiming that months earlier she had been assaulted in one of the Neptune Grand's rooms and left for dead. Management asks Veronica to investigate, before a full-blown scandal can harm the hotel's business.

Veronica's client is a headache, refusing to turn over its reservations list, and the accuser is no better, with her refusal to say who she was meeting that night and her inability to identify her attacker. The hotel's security system turns out to be no help, either, all of which leaves Veronica with a real investigative challenge on her hands.

Of course, the book is on my to-read list. In the meantime, I'll be looking forward to the September 15 debut of the web series Play It Again, Dick, a very metafictional and crazy-sounding story, in which Ryan Hansen, who played the inimitable Dick Casablancas on Veronica Mars, tries to cash in on the Veronica Mars movie buzz by getting the other cast members to make a spinoff with him.

Jonathan Kellerman and his son, Jesse, are collaborating on a new series featuring LAPD detective Jacob Lev. In The Golem of Hollywood (Putnam, September 16), Jacob had been working out of Hollywood Division, Robbery-Homicide. Jacob had a good record, until he didn't. He seems to be suffering from depression, though Captain Mendoza, who really doesn't like him, calls it a lot of other names and wants to get rid of him.

Now Jacob is on some "Special Projects" squad he never heard of, assigned to investigate a bizarre murder. Up in the Hollywood Hills, a murder victim is found––only it's not the entire victim, just a head. And the Hebrew word for "justice" is burned into the kitchen counter.

Jacob is in for a long, strange trip with this investigation, from Los Angeles, around the country and even overseas, to London and Prague, the home of the original Golem of Prague. You can read the first three chapters of the book at Jonathan Kellerman's website here.

Last summer, I stayed up until 3:00am reading Charlie Lovett's The Bookman's Tale––and trust me, unlike Georgette, I'm no night owl! Naturally, I pricked up my ears when I heard he has a new book coming out: First Impressions: A Novel of Old Books, Unexpected Love, and Jane Austen (Viking, October 20). Lovett continues his propensity to meld an old-book treasure hunt with a contemporary personal story.

Sophie Collingwood is the bibliomaniac this time around. She inherited her passion from her Uncle Bertram, and is crushed when, at his death, his books have to be sold to pay his outstanding debts. Sophie takes a job selling old books herself, and ends up on the trail of a book by clergyman Richard Mansfield, which may have been the inspiration for Pride and Prejudice, written by Mansfield's friend, Jane Austen.

Sophie's quest to determine whether Austen copied from Mansfield expands to include her efforts to satisfy her suspicions about her uncle's death. She also has to deal with two men competing for her affections; an American scholar and an English publisher.

Kirkus Reviews says this new book isn't nearly as fresh as The Bookman's Tale, and that Sophie's story "verg[es] on chick lit," while the Austen portions "test the patience of non-Austenophiles." This doesn't entirely put me off; it just makes me think this one might not keep me up reading past my bedtime.

Did you ever see that terrific 1971 Michael Caine flick, Get Carter? I did, and loved it. I didn't realize that the story came from Ted Lewis's 1970 book, Jack's Return Home. Soho Syndicate is republishing Lewis's book, under the title Get Carter on September 9, and I want to remedy my sin of reading omission.

Yorkshireman Jack Carter left the north of England and moved to London, where he became a mob enforcer. Eight years later, Jack's brother, Frank, is killed in a supposed car accident. Even though Jack hadn't spoken to Frank in years, he returns home and investigates to discover the truth about Frank's death, despite increasingly more pointed and then violent urgings that he stay out of the business of the local villains and return to the south.

Publishers Weekly raves about the book's "evocative prose" and Lewis's talent at "inject[ing] humor into the mostly gritty proceedings." PW also says that Ian Rankin fans who don't know Ted Lewis will be pleased with the story. If you enjoy the book, you should also try to find the two Jack Carter prequels Ted Lewis wrote, Jack Carter's Law and Jack Carter and the Mafia Pigeon.

Helen Giltrow's debut novel, The Distance (Doubleday, September 9) promises a modern, hard-edged thriller begging to be turned into an action-packed film. On the surface, Charlotte Alton is a cool, smooth, sophisticated young Londoner. But she has another identity, Karla, an expert in making information vanish.

One of the criminals whom Karla has helped disappear is Simon Johanssen, a military sniper who parlayed his skills into a second career as a hit man, and who needed a complete identity alteration when a mob hit he'd been hired to do went wrong. Simon comes to Karla to ask her to team up with him on a new job he has, to take out a prisoner in "The Program," an ultra-high-security prison in London that is an operational experiment, in that the prisoners essentially run their own community.

Karla's job is to set up an identity that will get Simon inside The Program and get him out when the job is done. But when she finds that his target doesn't seem to have any paper-trail existence, she becomes suspicious and feels compelled to find out who the target is and the reasons behind Simon's hire. To add extra tension to the plot, the mobster who has it in for Simon because of the botched hit just happens to be a current resident of The Program. Word is that this is an intense, dark, plot-driven thriller that will keep your mind racing trying to figure out what will happen next.

Another London-based page-turner coming out the same day as The Distance is Oliver Harris's Deep Shelter (Harper/Bourbon Street, September 9). This is the second entry in the DC Nick Belsey series, that began with The Hollow Man. Belsey is one of those cops who finds ethics a luxury beyond his budget, working in a city full of every temptation and every kind of corruption.

Bad-boy Belsey decides to impress his date, Jemma, by taking her to an abandoned World War II bomb shelter where he'd earlier found a store of drink and drugs. When she seemingly disappears into thin air, Belsey knows he must find her himself, and pronto, since otherwise he'll be the prime suspect in her missing-person case, or whatever worse kind of case it might turn into.

Belsey is convinced that the secret to Jemma's disappearance lies in the network of underground tunnels that hold secrets from decades past. As he searches, he begins to receive messages from Jemma's kidnapper, who is using the name Ferryman, which was the moniker of a famous spy during the Cold War. Time is running out as Belsey tries to figure out who Ferryman really is, rescue Jemma and avoid getting caught by his own police force. I need to get a copy of The Hollow Man read ASAP so that I'll be ready for Deep Shelter.

I can't exactly say I'm looking forward to Robert Baer's The Perfect Kill: 21 Laws for Assassins (Penguin/Blue Rider, October 28); that seems wrong, given the subject, but I'm intrigued. Baer spent 25 years as a CIA operative and assassin (though he claims he never succeeded in taking out a target).

In this wry, hard-eyed guide (hmm, do I really want to call something on this subject a guide?), Baer examines the history of political assassination, making the point that this tactic works better in combating evil than, say, drone strikes. Baer is the author of the best seller, See No Evil, which was adapted for the film Syriana, where his character was played by George Clooney. (Now there's an item for any man's bucket list!) Earlier this summer, it was announced that The Perfect Kill has already been optioned for a cable TV series.

I was lucky enough to receive an advance reviewing copy of Broadchurch (Minotaur, September 2), by Erin Kelly, from Chris Chibnall's screenplay for the popular television miniseries. I'll be writing about the book at length next week, but for now I want to let you know that this was a gripping novel that can stand on its own or be enjoyed even if you already watched the miniseries.

Broadchurch is a small beach town on the Dorset coast, where everybody knows everybody else. When 11-year-old Danny Latimer is found murdered on the beachfront, it turns everyone's lives upside down. Ellie Miller's family is close to the Latimers, but Ellie is a cop and she is constantly reminded by her acerbic new boss, DI Alec Hardy, that she must stay in that role and remember that nobody can be trusted.

Mark Latimer, Danny's father, has a secret that he refuses to tell, and soon even his wife, Beth, begins to suspect that he has a role in Danny's death. Neighbors begin to suspect each other, and secrets are brought to light that may ruin lives. A fascinating whodunnit, Broadchurch is also a thoughtful study of how murder affects a community.

Lucy Worsley is a new name to me, but she's a well-known historian in England, where history is all-important. At only 40 years old, Worsley is chief curator of the Historic Royal Palaces organization, and she regularly hosts history-related television series.

One of Worsley's interests is social history, and it looks like anything goes with her. Later this year, she's pairing up with Len Goodman, of Dancing With the Stars in the US and Strictly Come Dancing in the UK, to present a new BBC4 series called Dancing Cheek to Cheek: An Intimate History of Dance. The series studies the social history of popular dances, and at the end of each episode, Goodman and Worsley suit up in period costume and demonstrate a dance.

Worsley has also turned her attention to England's longtime fascination with murder, from Jack the Ripper to the Ratcliff Highway Murders to Dr. Crippen and, in fiction, from Sherlock Holmes, through the Golden Age to today. In The Art of English Murder (Pegasus Crime, October 8), Worsley examines just what it is that makes murder a near-obsession and an entertainment in England. Publishers Weekly gives the book a starred review and says: "Worsley's vivid account excites as much as its sensational subject matter, and edifies too, thanks to her learned explications."

We'll be back next week with even more previews of coming attractions.

Is she seriously writing about Veronica Mars again?

Yes, yes I am. It was a year ago when I wrote here about my love for the Veronica Mars TV series, which ran from 2004-2007, and the Kickstarter campaign to fund a Veronica Mars movie.

You probably heard that the Kickstarter campaign was wildly successful, raising $5.7 million ($3.7 million in excess of its goal). Veronica Mars fans––who call themselves Marshmallows––have been anxiously awaiting the movie since the campaign ended. Producer/director/writer Rob Thomas and team posted twice-weekly progress updates to Kickstarter backers and sent out tchotchkes like stickers and teeshirts.

After the world premiere at the South by Southwest film festival in Austin, Texas, on March 8, 2014, the big release day arrived; March 14, 2014. Warner Brothers had agreed to produce the movie if Rob Thomas could raise at least $2 million on Kickstarter, which put the movie in the unusual position of being financed by both the general public and a major studio. As a result, the movie opened in movie theaters and, on the same day, became available for on-demand streaming; a first for a major studio production.

I'll bet the green-eyeshade types at WB were biting their nails about the returns at the theaters, but they needn't have worried. The movie did very well and was an event almost like a Rocky Horror Picture Show screening. Marshmallows thronged the theaters in their Veronica Mars tees, talked back to the screen and sang along to the theme song, the Dandy Warhols' We Used To Be Friends.

The movie picks up nine years after the TV series ended, when Veronica was in college in that Raymond Chandler-esque sun-drenched Southern California Babylon called Neptune. Now she's in New York, a new graduate of Columbia Law School interviewing with a high-powered Manhattan law firm. (Look, it's Jamie Lee Curtis playing the firm's managing partner!) She lives with a nice-guy boyfriend who is a radio DJ. (Look, there he is at the radio studio talking with Ira Glass from This American Life!)

We're in New York for the approximately five minutes it takes for Veronica to give us a voiceover précis of her life and get a call from her bad-boy ex, Logan Echolls, who asks for her help. He's in a spot of bother, being suspected of killing his self-destructive pop star girlfriend Bonnie DeVille, who also happens to have been a high school classmate of Veronica and Logan. Like Michael Corleone in The Godfather III, just when Veronica thought she was out, they pull her back in.

So, not only does Veronica drop everything to jet back to Neptune and help out Logan, it also happens to be the weekend of her 10-year high school reunion. She is absolutely, positively, no way going to go to that horror show, but her best friends, Wallace and Mac, virtually abduct her to get her there. The reunion scenes are a gift to Marshmallows, since they get to see so many of the characters from the series, but fun for others too. After all, who wouldn't get vicarious enjoyment out of seeing somebody like Veronica cold-cock the high school mean-girl-in-chief?

Though the original plan was for Veronica to just help Logan hire a criminal lawyer, you know this Philip Marlowe in a petite blonde body can't just leave it there. Soon, she's deep into an investigation of Bonnie DeVille's murder, uncovering tantalizing facts from a long-ago disappearance, dealing with the present-day intrusions of the 24-hour celebrity "news" cycle (look, there are those creeps from TMZ, and there's a very odd cameo of James Franco!), and tangling with Neptune's venal new sheriff (look, there's Jerry O'Connell!).

The murder mystery is satisfying, with a yelp-inducing climax and a couple of other rapid-fire surprises that had me levitating from my chair. I don't think it's much of a spoiler to say that Veronica decides her real mission in life is to stick around, renew her PI license and work on cleaning up Neptune, rather than be just another suit in New York. As a scarred veteran of law firm life, it was easy for me to applaud that part of the plot, even if it made Veronica's father, Keith Mars, want to bang his head with frustration.

Even if you're not a Veronica Mars series veteran, you might enjoy the film. I know some people who said they did, and it made them seek out the old series. The film review site, Rotten Tomatoes, says: "It might be a more entertaining watch for diehard fans of the show, but Veronica Mars offers enough sharp writing and solid performances to entertain viewers in the mood for a character-driven thriller."

If you'd like to see the film, it's possible that it's still at an AMC theater near you––as long as you live in a major metropolitan area. But you can watch it from the comfort of your couch, which seems like the right place to watch Veronica Mars, by streaming it from iTunes, Flixster, Amazon Instant Video, Xbox Video, Vudu and more. The DVD goes on sale on May 6.

The movie only made me want more Veronica Mars, and that clever Rob Thomas knew that would be the result for Marshmallows. So he launched a Veronica Mars book series on March 25, 2014, with the first book, The Thousand Dollar Tan Line (Random House), picking up a couple of months from where the movie left off.

There are nothing but crickets for Veronica at Mars Investigations, and the chances of her ever paying off her school loans look slim, until the Chamber of Commerce hires her to investigate the spring break disappearance of a college girl. The disappearance has become a national cause celèbre, bad for Neptune's businesses, and Sheriff Lamb is clearly not competent to do the job.

Just as in the series and the movie, Veronica dives in, calling on her cadre of friends, like Mac and Wallace, to help out with legwork and the high-level technical stuff. The mystery is on a par with what Marshmallows are used to from the TV series, with the added benefit of a major plot twist that Veronica runs into during the investigation and that rocks her back on her heels.

As a book, of course this was somewhat less heavy on the dialog than a film/TV script. That makes sense, but it did mean there wasn't quite as much of that snarky patter that typifies the onscreen versions. What made up for that for me was to listen to the audiobook version, read by Kristen Bell, who plays Veronica Mars on the screen. Naturally, she's excellent reading Veronica, but she's surprisingly good at giving voices to all the other characters.

I don't think the book would be of much interest to anyone who hasn't seen the series or the movie, but if you have, it's well worth reading and will pass the time while we're waiting to see if there will be a movie sequel.