A screwball detective comedy about a middle-aged hairdresser whose plans to improve her life go awry. Featuring mysterious handsome strangers, poisoned mascara and Slim-Fast, a dead cheerleader and an all-powerful local employer.
Chosen because: Found on a shelf in a hotel in Thailand
One minute it's a dead secret hidden in a crumbling Victorian manor-house, the next it's a middle-aged New Jersey hairdresser with ambitions for self-improvement. You can't say that the world of detective fiction is limited in scope.
Bubbles Yablonsky is the said New Jersey hairdresser, and more than conscious that she needs to provide her teenage daughter with a role model. So she returns to education, struggling through course after course at the local community college, until she finds her niche as a freelance journalist for the local paper. What starts as reporting on the minutiae of local life rapidly turns into a murder investigation that could help her hit the big time.
Bubbles is a heroine very much in the mode of Stephanie Plum, Janet Evanowitz's kooky and unquashable bail-bondsman. There's the same fast-paced action, the quirky elderly relatives, the troubles and opportunities of small town New Jersey life. In fact, Sarah Strohmeyer mentions in the acknowledgements that Bubbles was dreamt up at Evanowitz's kitchen table. But while Stephanie Plum is light-hearted comedy from start to finish, Stohmeyer's book is a slightly more uneasy blend of the serious and the screwball. Bubbles has real dilemmas that Stephanie never sees - a hamster doesn't need it's owner to set it a good example. And so she goes back to education, keeps up her job in the salon where she has responsibilities and commitments, and thinks carefully about sleeping with the handsome love-god who appears on her doorstep. I like the idea - frankly, Stephanie Plum's endless faffing between the two impossibly good-looking men in her life is starting to annoy me - but in practice, I felt that the serious and the comic sides of the plot didn't quite fit together. The local steelwork's irresponsible business practices was particularly awkward in this respect, ranging between being matter for gross-out jokes and for the tragic death of Bubbles' father. Frankly, I think that Strohmeyer might have been more at home writing a more openly political crime thriller, in the style of Sara Paretsky's V.I. Warshawski novels.
Having said all that, if you like Stephanie Plum (and I do), it's well worth trying out Bubbles Yablonsky.
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