Seventeen and Eighteen

I was a little put off by Janet Evanovich's Sizzling Sixteen, feeling it lacked some of the zany energy that her books usually have. But she seems to have regained her footing in Smokin' Seventeen and Explosive Eighteen. In Seventeen, Stephanie's mom is once again trying to set her up with a future mate since neither Morelli nor Ranger seem likely to make the commitment to marriage. While the burned out bail bonds office--temporarily replaced by Mooner's bus--is under construction, dead bodies start showing up in shallow graves on the construction site. The killer is apparently making this personal for Stephanie. Meanwhile, Morelli's grandmother puts the Vordo spell on Stephanie with wild results. Eighteen opens with Stephanie returning from a vacation in Hawaii one day ahead of both Ranger and Morelli--but no one is talking about what happened. Eventually we learn why she has a white tan line on her left hand ring finger, but it takes longer to find out why the photograph that mysteriously appeared in her purse on the flight back is bringing strangers out of the woodwork to threaten Stephanie if she doesn't return it. Except that she doesn't have it anymore. Cars and buses are destroyed, Lula takes a love potion by accident and falls in love with one of their more unsavory FTA's, and their investigations result in a lot of roosters being loosed on Trenton.