Devil's Food: A Loretta Kovacs Thriller

In Anthony Bruno's novel, two members of the New Jersey "jump squad" track a parole violator to Florida where an IRS agent and a murderous bike are competing to grab her.

For Loretta Kovacs, working on the Parole Violation Search Unit (aka "the Jump Squad") is the last rung on the ladder taking her career in law enforcement to the bottom. She's 34 years old, she's fat and she's single, and she constantly has to fight a voice in her head that constantly reminds her of all of those things. Things began to go bad for Loretta at Pinebrook Women's Correctional Facility where Loretta was working as an assistant warden when she ended up being taken hostage by a psycho drug dealer serving life for murder. Loretta still has flashbacks about her treatment at the hands of Brenda Montgomery. If she can't make this job with the Jump Squad work, Loretta is afraid she's going to have to admit to her disapproving father that she should have gone to law school as he wanted her to. Paired up with sexy partner Frank Marvella (shades of Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum series), Loretta has one week to retrieve parole violater Martha Lee Spooner .

Right about the time Loretta is wondering if Frank Marvelli sleeps in the nude, most readers are going to lose sympathy with her. We can believe he looks pretty tasty to her, despite what she describes as his "greaseball" hairstyle, but it's clear to everyone that while he appreciates her thick attractiveness, he's in love with his dying wife

Bruno is a versatile writer who's written biographies of criminals and several different series, several of them with women at the center. His female characters here feel exaggerated. They think about sex a lot. It's nice that people find Loretta attractive despite her extra weight, but for women who read mysteries, this isn't a novelty. There are a lot of plus-size protagonists of mysteries, especially in the cozy sub-genre.

The problem with the other characters is that Bruno has clearly built in the quirks to be QUIRKY with a capital Q but there's not much to them. We can see that if this book kicks off a series, he would pluck the same note over and over and it's not going to wear well in the long run. (Series that run a long time, like Evanovich's, have characters that you want to hang out with, and even then, readers will start to complain if the same shtick is used too often.)

Bruno "headhops" in the book, showing us the story from several different points of view, and all that does is show that all of his characters are kind of shallow. The real problem with the book, which is dated (who uses faxes anymore?), is that the plot is both overly complicated and way, way, way too convenient and contrived.

The plot just gets more and more unlikely. When Martha Lee finds a murderer in her room, the only thing she can think to do is seduce him. Smart move, actually, but when we come in on her next, she's thinking about how he's hung like a Louisville slugger, and again we want to just bitch-slap the writer. Seriously? Really? She's acting like an extra in SEX AND THE CITY while being chased to hell and back by people who want to kill her?

This book is mildly entertaining, no more, and there are many books that do the same thing, only better.