Bob Mayer

Jennifer Crusie and Bob Mayer are back?!?!?! Hot Damn!

And this is exactly what I hoped for -- great characters, family drama, hijinks, and small town politics. I loved it. Things I particularly loved:

1: Liz setting boundaries with loved ones. This is a beautiful thing to see, and it's modeled in current ways of speech, which I also really appreciate.

2: Liz's peripatetic life also seems very on the nose for young people nowadays (god I feel old) -- working out of her car, freelancing -- I show more wish that wasn't the way things are, but I love that she acquires a fairy godcelebrity.

3: I think the cops should ask Bob to be their marketing manager and trainer. Vince definitely softens my feelings towards them, although the gun scenarios are terrifying. I really appreciate that he flat out talks about not stopping women and minorities unless there's a real safety issue because he knows that they have something to fear.

4: I love the quirks -- Liz's adoration of diners and vintage t-shirts -- so great.

Anyway, delicious, as always. Welcome back! show less

Bob Mayer is the kind of author who can happily drag me into the world of non-fiction and make me enjoy it. His first book in this series, “Shit Doesn’t Just Happen I” was extremely readable, and I had hoped at the time I read it that he would write a sequel. In “Shit Doesn’t Just Happen I”, Mayer detailed disasters like the sinking of the Titanic, the Donner Party, and the New London Schoolhouse explosion and broke down the steps leading up to the final tragedy. His background show more as a Special Forces Green Beret gives him a unique and intelligent perspective on “cascade events”, indicators that allow key decision makers to mitigate or even avoid the catastrophic event before it unfolds. In “Shit Doesn’t Just Happen Ii” , Mayer breaks down the Challenger explosion, the sinking of the Kursk, Pearl Harbor, and four additional tragedies in the same vein as “Shit Doesn’t Just Happen I”, explaining what went wrong where and how different decisions could have led to far different outcomes.

This book fascinated me by explaining how distant key decision makers are from the actual knowledge and experience of the engineers and manufacturers who are the best folks to go to for questions of performance under pressure, as in the Challenger explosion. I was also stunned and exasperated by how keen some countries are to not accept help from other nations even in times of great need, be it because of their pride or their desire to keep “top secret” well, top secret.

I will say that the beginning sections and the final sections of both volumes of Shit Doesn’t Just Happen closely mirror each other. This is where Mayer outlines his theory that most catastrophes can be predicted and avoided if we pay attention to the cascading events and stop the mind set of complacency when warning signals go off. This is convenient and allows readers to enjoy either book as a standalone-or to go nuts and read them both! show less

This is the second book by Crusie and Mayer, and it’s better than their first. In fact, this is one of my favorite books; it’s witty and wise and imbued with absurdities. Like in their previous collaboration, Crusie wrote the female POV, and Mayer wrote the male POV. When their lines intertwine in the plot, sparks fly and mirth explodes, satisfying the reader’s craving for laughter.
The female protagonist Agnes is a sassy, lonesome newspaper columnist with the anger problem. Every time show more her anger gets the better of her, she whacks the object of her ire by a frying pan. “Why a frying pan?” asked her psychiatrist once, and she answered: “Because that’s what I usually have in my hand.” For Agnes is a food writer and she loves to cook.
This time, when a stranger breaks into her house to steal her dog, she again has a non-stick frying pan in her hand. The ensuing scene, the opening episode of the novel, is one of the most amusing, laugh-out-loud scenes I’ve ever read.
Unlike peaceful but cranky Agnes, the male protagonist Shane is a US government-sanctioned assassin, the hitman from the title. At his uncle’s request, Shane arrives at Agnes’s house to take care of the family business: protecting Agnes. But when he asks his uncle – a former mobster – what he had to protect Agnes from, the uncle becomes slippery. The resulting brew of 25-year-old mob secrets, shady government politics, a wedding in jeopardy, a cookbook in the making, and a couple of desolate flamingos keep the reader glued to the book until the last page.
With so many disparate ingredients, livened up by two superior writers, the novel can’t help but to be a flavorful stew. The romantic overtones and the sexual delights swirling between Shane and Agnes add the air of sophistication not many romantic novels possess.
While Shane deals with murders and mobsters that spring like mushrooms across the swampy landscape of the tale, Agnes cooks and feeds her guests. The more people she has to cook for the happier she is. She also has to throw a wedding, protect her house from a sabotaging widow, break up with her two-faced fiancé, dodge the lineup of thugs who are trying to kill her, and write her next column by the fast-approaching deadline.
And then there is Shane, who (oh, horror!) kills people for a living. But no matter how often she makes a resolution not to sleep with him … again … she can’t resist her heart. After all, he kills to protect her. And he buys her an air conditioner. And he installs black shutters on her dream house. And he enjoys her food. And he keeps her loneliness at bay. A perfect man by any standards.
As for Shane, an outwardly emotionless fighting machine, Agnes brings color and flavor, warmth and softness into the cold milieu of his personal and professional life. Her “pattable” body and her sweet and spicy passions force him to reevaluate a score of his past decisions and come to some rather unexpected new ones.
A book for everyone.
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The dialogue is trite. The sex is bland. The characters are cardboard cutouts. The plot is inane and unbelievable. It seems that the author(s) can’t figure out what kind of book this is. Is it a comic crime caper? A mystery? A romance? A mafia thriller? A cooking cozy? Bodies pile up left and right, plot lines disintegrate or appear from thin air. Even the editing is bad … the electricity goes out, thanks to a bad guy who “did something” to the power, but early the next morning Agnes show more is in the kitchen using her coffee grinder and CD player. The authors would have us believe that her cooking is so great that people set their guns down to feast on pancakes and ham (and where does all this food come from when she never goes to the store … and remember that the electricity was out … we’re talking South Carolina summer HEAT). Oh, and what’s with the psychiatrist (who just disappears in the middle of the book). Crusie (or Mayer) does manage to write a few humorous scenes that tickle me, but if it weren’t for a Shelfari book group Challenge I would not have finished it at all. show less