Mr. Kiss and Tell by Rob Thomas and Jennifer GrahamVintage (Random House), 2015

This was a really good read for a Sunday when I was home sick with a cold/fever: it was good enough that I didn’t even feel too bad about not being able to partake in my usual Sunday evening activity (rock climbing). I think it’s better-written than the previous Veronica Mars book (The Thousand Dollar Tan Line) was: there was only one sentence I noticed that was so horrible that I had to stop reading and comment on how bad it was to my boyfriend. (Describing Veronica watching a surveillance video showing another character: “She headed to the elevator. Inside, the close-up of her face showed her carefully made-up face” (122).) But the writing isn’t the point of these books, for me: it’s the chance to be surrounded, again, by familiar characters from the TV series: crime-solving Veronica, her PI dad Keith (who’s currently fighting corruption in the local sheriff’s department), former biker-gang leader Eli Navarro (who’s fighting a series of charges in a situation in which the police department planted evidence on him), basketball-player-turned-basketball-coach Wallace Fennel, and others.

The crime in this one is pretty gruesome: a local 19-year-old woman is raped, beaten, and left for dead in a field at the edge of town. She’d been drinking at the bar of the fancy Neptune Grand hotel, and she claims that it was a hotel employee who assaulted her. Veronica is hired by the hotel’s insurance company, who clearly want the victim’s story not to be true. There’s DNA evidence, but the hotel employee has since been deported (the victim had brain trauma and claimed not to remember anything about her assault, but later claimed to have regained some memories, and the accused was an undocumented immigrant), so it’s not as simple as just getting a sample from him to prove his innocence or guilt. And despite the hotel’s many security cameras, there’s no footage of the victim leaving the hotel. So who was her attacker, and what happened, exactly? Meanwhile, subplots: after his criminal trial concludes, Keith encourages Weevil to bring a civil suit against the sheriff’s department about the planted evidence, and a new contender appears in the previously-uncontested sheriff’s race, meaning that maybe the corruption in the Neptune police department has a chance of getting cleaned up. And oh, Veronica and her boyfriend get a puppy, aww.