Well, if you thought Stephanie Plum had her hands full with Morelli and Ranger, wait until you meet Diesel, the newest man to "pop" into her life. It's a few days before Christmas and Stephanie hasn't sent cards, done any shopping or bought a tree. Are you surprised? Now she and Diesel need to track down Sandy Claws who skipped his court hearing.

And you can bet that there will be at least one car catching on fire too.

It's a Merry Christmas from The Burg!

I liked this version of Stephanie Plum. She isn't as incompetent as she is in the regular books. She's

The audiobooks of the Stephanie Plum series are much better than reading the books. The narrator is fantastic. I enjoy her work a lot. When I read these later editions of Stephanie Plum I get annoyed a lot more than when listening to the audio book.

Just the type of mindless read I was looking for to take my mind off of real life. As always, Diesel cracked me up and Grandma stole the show.

Awful.

This Between-the-Numbers book is short and kind of boring. It introduces Diesel, but fails to make him interesting. It feels scattered, despite the fact that Stephanie only has one focus for the whole book. There's no Ranger (yay!) but there's also only two pages of Lula (boo!). Stephanie is chasing a magical man who might be Santa Claus. He is guarded by an army of little people who might be elves. The elves often attack Stephanie, pelting her with cookies or jumping onto her car and having to be flung off by windshield wipers.

There really isn't much else to say. This one is completely skippable, although it does include major plot points like Valerie's pregnancy and Stephanie's CR-V blowing up. Stephanie's mindset regarding Valerie fascinates me, though. "I actually thought Valerie could do a lot worse than Albert Kloughn. I liked Kloughn. He wasn't a big, handsome, super-cool guy, but he tried hard at everything, he was nice to Valerie and the girls, and there seemed to be genuine affection between them."

Stephanie herself would /never/ be with a guy who wasn't "big, handsome [and] super-cool" so all this B.S. about Albert "trying hard at everything" has a very not-in-my-backyard (or, in this case, not-in-my-vagina) feel to it. There are so many men Stephanie has turned down who are just like Albert Kloughn, so she shouldn't be giving this advice.

My favorite line in a book without any other real quotable ones: "I was planning on giving Rex a raisin for Christmas."

It's a few days before Christmas and, like usual, Stephanie Plum is less than prepared. She keeps putting off everything, including finding her latest skip Sandy Claws. Suddenly a not-too-bad-looking man appears in her kitchen. He's going to help her get in the Christmas spirit and find Claws. But how exactly did he just appear like that? Typical to Stephanie's chaotic nature, there's a car fire and other craziness that follows her around.

I was pretty disappointed with this book compared to the rest in the series. It was rushed and not nearly as funny as most the books in this series. Perhaps that's because there wasn't enough time to have grandma or Lula get up to their regular antics. The book just ended and I was left with the feeling that I was missing something.

The introduction of Diesel...

Cute, fun easy read. :)