Stars: 2 out of 5
Pros: The plot is fun at times
Cons: Characters are bad, pacing is uneven
The Bottom Line:
Nick and Kate are back
In name only.
Characters
Nothing like we know
The Big Letdown
I’m not normally a Janet Evanovich reader, but I made an
exception for the Fox and O’Hare series because of the co-writer, Lee
Goldberg. I’ve been a fan of his books
for a long time. I found the first five
books in the series to be fun capers, and it is nice to get outside my normal
cozy sub-genre every so often. Book five
in the series came out almost three years ago, but I’ve been tracking The Big Kahuna, the sixth in the
series. Its release kept being delayed,
and I noticed that Janet’s son, Peter, was now listed as the co-author. Undeterred, I requested it from the
library. I’m glad that is how I got the
book.
If you are new to the series, Kate O’Hare is an FBI agent
who spent years of her career tracking down master thief and conman Nick
Fox. However, once captured, Nick offers
his services to the FBI, and Kate reluctantly starts working with him quietly
as they concoct elaborate cons to take down dangerous criminals that couldn’t
be touched any other way. Meanwhile, the
two slowly begin to admit their growing feelings for each other.
Or at least that was the premise for the first five books in
the series.
This book finds the pair asked to look for a tech
billionaire known to pretty much everyone as The Big Kahuna. He disappeared a few days ago, but Kate and
Nick are shocked to find that both his wife and his business partner are
already hoping to have him declared dead.
Kate and Nick aren’t willing to declare him dead yet; they think he
might be hiding out in Hawaii. With
Kate’s father and Cosmo, another FBI agent, tagging along, they set out to see
if they can find him. However, it
appears someone wants The Big Kahuna dead.
Can they find him in time? Or
will they lead the killers right to him?
Fans of the series can already spot the big complaint with
this book. This is not a Fox and O’Hare
plot. Yes, we do pull off a couple of
small cons, but nowhere near the big scale con that would require Nick’s
skills, and we don’t need any of the regular crew to pull them off. Any detective can hunt for a missing person
which is really what happens here, and that’s not what Nick and Kate do.
Then there are the characters. Kate is supposed to be a take no prisoners
FBI agent who is one of the best agents in the country. Here, Nick takes the lead on most of what
they do, and Kate lets him, relying on him to make all the decisions. Yes, he used to take the lead on the cons,
but Kate would lead on other parts of each mission. They had a dynamic that worked well with both
of them bring something to the partnership, but that isn’t the case here at
all. Furthermore, their romantic
relationship seems to have backtracked about four books. Granted, it’s been three years since I read book
5, so I am hazy about how that book left things, but I seem to remember them
being a couple, at least much as they could since they couldn’t acknowledge
they were working together in public.
Now, we are back to Nick flirting with a Kate who doesn’t want to have
anything more than she has to with him.
Speaking of being seen in public, they also have meetings in
the FBI together, and fly a commercial flight together, again things they never
would have done in previous books.
I’ve said in the past that the characters have never been
the strong point of the series, but clearly there was something to the
characters in the past if I feel this strongly about Kate and Nick. Kate’s father, likewise, becomes a caricature
of his former self with some moments that are very out of character for
him. Cosmo was in the earlier books, but
he only had a scene or two, which was good since he is funny in extremely small
doses. We get too much of him here. And the new characters? They are all one note jokes, per se, and
those notes are used as much as possible to try to get us to laugh. They would have been funny in small doses,
but not as major characters.
Then there’s the plot.
It starts off slowly with long passages describing places in
Hawaii. Granted, they made me want to
visit the islands, but it also took much longer than it needed to at
times. They could have cut out 30 pages
easily and the book already reads short as it is. I did find myself getting into the story at
times, and I cared enough to want to know how it ended. There are some fun action sequences –
improbable but still fun. I was able to
devote quite a bit of time to reading it over a weekend, which definitely
helped. If it had dragged on for too
much longer, I would have gotten very frustrated with it.
Clearly, the fact that this book took so long to come out
wasn’t to work out issues with the story to make it stronger. I don’t know if any further books in the
series are planned, but The Big Kahuna
might be it for me, even if I can get further books from the library.
If you want some fun capers, do go back and check out the
earlier books in the Fox and O’Hare series.
Agree 100%
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