There is a method behind the madness

High stakes...

Sue Gibbons, Jessica Wakefield's biggest rival, has been kidnapped! Just weeks after gorgeous Jeremy Randall left her at the altar for Jessica, things have gone from bad to worse for the Wakefields' houseguest. Now Sue's captor is threatening to kill her if the Wakefields don't pay up.

Jeremy, Jessica's fiancé, insists he'll find the kidnapper, and Jessica and Elizabeth are determined to help. But when Jessica discovers Jeremy in the wrong place at the wrong time, she smells a rat. Will Jessica have to betray the man of her dreams in order to save Sue's fortune - and her life?

As I noted on Goodreads, this book is mind-blowingly awful and pretty much has to be read in one sitting, or you'd never pick it up again. The ridiculous starts right from the first page, and continues until the last.

( The kind of filler that makes you almost immediately sick upon consuming )

The most frustrating thing about this book is that everyone has to be a complete idiot to make the plot even near the realm of plausibility. Jeremy is so certain that he can charm anyone into doing anything he likes that he's momentarily stunned that Mr Wakefield contacts a detective upon learning of Sue's disappearance. Like - really, dude? You thought you were that good? The fact that everyone acts very stupidly and allows him to make a clean getaway helps his cause, but surely someone (besides Sue and Jessica) know that he was behind it all? He was the only one who came and went from the Wakefield residence the entire time, so of course the leaks came from him! I wanted to throttle pretty much everyone.

The funniest bit was definitely learning that Bruce Patman won the costume contest at the Halloween party in the last book, and he came dressed as his own car, LMAO. I certainly hope that included the iconic 1BRUCE1 license plate!!

That, and the fact that Elizabeth's kidnapping from #13 Kidnapped! features in fairly heavy rotation during this stressful time, earns this book the single star I'm giving it.

Thank goodness we're near the end of this mess, even if we do have to go through a Thriller-length finale book to get there.

Jessica Wakefield is living a double life! At the same time she and her twin sister, Elizabeth, are helping their new friend, Sue Gibbons, plan her wedding, Jessica's meeting secret with Sue's fiance, Jeremy Randall. Elizabeth warns her to stay away, but Jessica can't help herself - she's never been so much in love!

When Jeremy tells her he can't go through with marrying Sue, Jessica is ecstatic. But tragedy intervenes when Sue is stricken by a deadly disease, and torn by guilt, Jeremy decides he must walk down the aisle.

Will Jessica stand by and let Jeremy say "I do"?

Well, I suppose it was inevitable that a great book (by SV standards) is followed by a complete dud. This was poorly written, the characters reduced to crude personality traits, and pushed around the chess board in service of the plot. Anything approaching reality was thrown out the window. It was completely devoid of any nuance or callback to previous canon (or even the previous book!). What a letdown.

( I never knew it was too much to ask for two consecutive books to be written by the same ghostwriter )

I can only just shake my head at this nonsense. Perhaps most amusing of all, the little teaser blurb calls the next three-part series Sweet Valley Scandal, when in fact this two-parter was actually labeled that and the rest of the series was called something else. It's sloppy right to the final word, which is only fitting IMO.

Its officially October, and that means it's time for impy & my annual nostalgia re-readathon. We usually dip into Sweet Valley series for this, and the last couple of years we've also been reading one book from Christopher Pike's The Last Vampire miniseries. This year we're adding the Baby-sitters Club to the mix.

I'm super stoked and can't wait to start!! As I have for the last couple of years, I will be posting my reviews of the books here, along with the covers and back summaries.

Here's the schedule:

Week of 10/06/24: SVU Super Thriller #3 Kiss of the Vampire
Week of 10/13/24: SVU Super Thriller #11 Love & Murder
Week of 10/20/24: BSC Super Mystery #1 Baby-sitters' Haunted House
Week of 10/27/24: The Last Vampire #4 Phantom