Mrs. Plansky's Revenge
The Mrs. Plansky series, Book 1
Spencer Quinn
Forge Books
Fiction, Mystery
*** (Okay)
DESCRIPTION: Recently widowed Mrs. Loretta Plansky has a good life in Florida, playing tennis at the club (thanks to her brand-new hip) and visiting her aging father at his care facility and fielding requests for support from her children and grandchildren. Thanks to her late husband Norm's popular invention (well, it was her idea, but they both developed it), a knife that toasts bread as you slice, she has quite the comfortable nest egg, more than enough to see her through her twilight years. So when she gets a late-night call from her wayward grandson Will, she hardly hesitates to wire him money to help him out of a jam... only it was not her grandson at all, and the next day she learns that her entire life savings - over three million dollars - has vanished. Worse, the FBI rather bluntly informs her that she's unlikely to recover a penny of the lost funds. There are just too many cyber criminals running too many sophisticated scams, and too many international diplomatic mine fields to pursue them... in this case, to somewhere in Romania, a hot spot for such activity under a government that is notoriously reticent to help Americans investigate what is essentially a lucrative cottage industry to many impoverished towns. Loretta may not be a spring chicken anymore, and she may have the odd memory lapse, but she's not about to stand back at let the bad guys get away with stealing her late husband's legacy and her family's security for the future - and if the feds can't or won't do their job, well, then she'll just have to do it for them.
In Romania, teenager Dinu has shown a knack for picking up American English and its many confusing colloquialisms, making him a rising star in his uncle Dragomir's phone scam business. Dazzled by praise and money (and too familiar with the bruises that come with letting Dragomir down - a man who essentially runs their small Romanian town, even owning the local law), he sees a bright future ahead, full of motorcycles and women and maybe, someday, even a trip to see the almost mythic country of the people he's helping to fleece. After all, it's not like he'll ever have to face a victim of his crimes - a crime that hardly seems like a crime at all, just words over the phone and numbers on a computer screen. But he soon discovers that the bright future he thought he saw for himself may instead be a trap from which he'll never escape.
REVIEW: It looked like a light cozy mystery with a little humor and a plucky heroine. At times, it is indeed that. But Mrs. Plansky takes far too long dithering and fumbling before finally getting to the promised "revenge" of the title, just as Dinu is far too dim and self-absorbed as he meanders though the heady success and addictive easy cash of his first successful scams only to slowly realize just what he's actually got himself into and how firm and cruel Uncle Dragomir's grip over his life truly has become.
The reader meets Loretta as a cheerful retiree on the tennis court, living her best life in the Sunshine State. If her 98-year-old father, slowly deteriorating to the point of needing extra care, is a weight on her, and if her family seems more interested in the checks she might write them than keeping in touch out of love, well, she enjoys being able to help others, and it makes her feel wanted and important, filling a void left by her husband's passing. She drifts through many memories of Norm at random times, distracting both the reader and herself from the greater story, which is in no hurry to get going. On Dinu's end, it's tough feeling much empathy for a brazen thief, even one too naive to connect his actions with the harm those actions do half a world away; he's confused when his crush breaks up with him after watching him work, and never really does seem to figure out why. In his defense, though, his only model for masculinity has been his uncle, essentially a mob boss, who commands loyalty with a mixture of charisma, lavish gifts, and visits from enforcers when displeased, but Dinu's own attempts to buy love and loyalty with gifts go terribly awry, not helped by having a brain clouded by adolescent hormones and impossible dreams. Eventually, after much denial and more dithering on both their parts, they each determine their own ways to change their circumstances... both running into unexpected obstacles and sidetracks before their paths cross in Romania. As an investigator, Loretta is very much hit-and-miss on actually investigating, luck playing a disproportionate role as she slowly circles in on the thieves behind her misfortune. Her age is both a liability - her mind has a bad habit of wandering, her new hip never signed up for pursuing suspects and creeping through secret passages, and her stamina is not what it was fifty years ago - and an asset, as elderly women are often dismissed and overlooked. Eventually, things come together for an ending that feels a little too neat and easy after the long and meandering buildup.
There were some fun moments and amusing bits, but I never really took to Loretta as an investigator, nor to Dinu as a bamboozled young man trying to make a better life for himself under circumstances inherently inhospitable to good lives. The whole just felt too much like like Loretta's mind, forever distracted from itself and what it was ostensibly doing.
You Might Also Enjoy:
Slow Horses (Mike Herron) - My Review
An Elderly Lady Is Up to No Good (Helene Tursten) - My Review
Remarkably Bright Creatures (Shelby Van Pelt) - My Review
No comments:
Post a Comment