by Wendy R.

Created on: August 16, 2010

In Lean Mean Thirteen Stephanie is on the lookout for Dickie Orr, her creep of an ex-husband. Stephanie really doesn't want to find Dickie, but goes looking for him as a favor to the ever hot Carlos Manoso, aka Ranger. Well, it turns out that Dickie is in all sorts of trouble and Stephanie wants to hurt him. So what does she do, she tries to get Dickie in trouble by seeing if he is involved with drugs or money laundering.

 No wonder Dickie and a whole lot of cash have gone missing. Sure looks like he is guilty of something.

The police find blood and bullet holes at Dickie's place and because of Stephanie's feelings towards her ex-husband, she becomes the prime suspect in his disappearance/apparent death.But Dickie has a long list of people looking to hurt him, including former business partners, as we see Dickie has been involved with people involved with money laundering and drug running.

This book is full of family arguments and the usual Stephanie bounty hunting problems. A lot of the wit and edgy dialogue is missing making me wonder who is doing the writing in this one. Even the main characters seem different. Maybe the author is running out of ideas for them.

Lean Mean Thirteen is a fun book, but I find these later books in the series are getting a little stale. The pranks are all the same, Grandma Mazur’s trips to the funeral parlor are even getting stale.Stephanie's love life is stagnant, nothing ever gets resolved there. Cars and homes and people still get blown up, and as always, Stephanie is accident prone. It seems like this book is just rehashing previous ones in the series. There is nothing new, and as you read along, everything is very predictable. Stephanie is still driving clunkers, the usual car or house blows up. The props used to move the story have not been changed at all. I admit they worked the first couple of times through, but there have to be some new ideas somewhere. If not, it is time to end the series, hopefully on a happy note. I have found the last few books repetitive and boring and will probably not read too many more. If I do, they will definitely be something I will take from the local library. While Lean Mean Thirteen is an okay read, I would probably just rate it a 3/5 at the most.

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