I actually bought the first book in this duology by Rob Thomas and Jennifer Graham a few years ago, but never got around to reading it. Then the fourth season was released on Hulu and I heard the books contain critical plot points that get referenced in the fourth season, so I rewatched the first three seasons and the movie before finally getting around to reading these two books. That said, there are spoilers in this review, so if you haven’t gotten around to watching all of the first three seasons and the movie and reading the two books and you still care about spoilers, then now is the time to stop reading.
Since both books are fairly short, I don’t feel the need to go over every plot twist, so I’ll just stick with the major plot plot points, especially as they pertain to things that might get mentioned in the fourth season (which, as of this writing, I still have not seen).
The first book picks up almost immediately where the movie left off. Logan is serving overseas and he and Veronica are trying to stay connected via Skype and email. Eli is on trial for allegedly threatening Mrs. Kane with a gun that was planted on him by the crooked cops of Neptune. Sheriff Lamb is still in charge because he helps the rich people stay rich, but honestly, it feels like a cop-out, no pun intended. I know there was Don Lamb and Dan Lamb, but honestly, I can’t remember which is which and I don’t care. The show killed off the first one, but then still wanted to blame everything on “Sheriff Lamb” so they magically came up with another Sheriff D. Lamb to screw everything up. The first was just incompetent, whereas the second is corrupt, but other than that, they’re pretty interchangeable and I think they’re meant to be.
Keith is in physical therapy after the massive car “accident” that almost killed him in the movie, so Veronica has taken over what little work Mars Investigations has, even though Keith is still trying to get her to go back to finding a job that would actually use her very expensive law degree.
Keith is still living in the house he somehow moved into between the show and the movie, which never made any sense to me because, as far as I can recall, he didn’t get any kind of windfall in that time, so I’m not sure how he suddenly has the money for a nice house when he could barely afford that two-bedroom apartment before.
Meanwhile, Veronica has moved into a small apartment of her own.
Mac was working for Kane’s massive tech company, but for some reason quit that very lucrative job to work for Veronica so she can only get paid occasionally. I mean, I know she and Veronica are tight, but come on. Can’t she do her hacking for Veronica on the side while still making big bucks working for The Man?
Wallace is still a teacher at good old Neptune High, but, as usual, gets roped into helping Veronica with various sports-related aspects of her cases.
If you watched the show, you won’t be surprised to hear that both books deal with women’s issues. The first book deals with girls going missing while on spring break in Neptune and Sheriff D. Lamb not caring enough to investigate. Despite the fact that the Chamber of Commerce backs Lamb as sheriff, the head of the CoC cannot have these disappearances hurting Neptune’s PR, and by extension, the revenue it generates from all the spring breakers. So she hires Veronica to get to the bottom of it.
As it turns out, one of the two girls who went missing is the step-daughter of the woman who left Keith and Veronica at the end of the first season – after stealing Veronica’s college fund. Apparently she has since sobered up (for real this time), remarried, and had a son. So, yeah, Veronica now has a half brother, and while she still has a lot of complicated feelings about her mom, she does want to be a part of his life, so even in the second book, they’re still Skyping and she’s helping pay for things like summer camp and music lessons for him, although I’m not sure how she can afford any of that if business at Mars Investigations is really as poor as they keep saying it is.
The second book deals with a rape case, and while part of me is tempted to say this series has dealt with rape enough, the Kavanaugh hearings and a recent, rather traumatic fight with my dad and brother over whether rape victims are credible leads me to conclude that, no, in fact, we have not talked about it enough. So have at it, Mars. Beat that horse. Because it just won’t die.
To complicate my feelings further, the rape victim of the second book does turn out to be lying … sort of. She’s not lying about the fact that she got raped, just who her attacker was. In her defense, despite knowingly accusing an innocent man, she intentionally chooses an illegal immigrant who’s already been deported, so she doesn’t expect him to actually go to jail over her accusations. She just wants a payout from the hotel that hired him to cover her lost income as a sex worker.
Yep, she’s a prostitute. And the book loses no time discussing how infuriatingly little anyone cares about prostitutes, which I actually appreciated. Veronica manages to track down the real attacker, who, of course, has a history of attacking prostitutes. No one will come forward about any of the previous attacks because they all know that they’ll get the bad end of that deal, so Veronica goes further outside the bounds of the law than is normal, even for her, by having the boyfriend of one of the attacker’s would-be victims go at him.
What made the book really interesting was that the prostitute who falsely accused the deported hotel worker is Grace Manning, Meg’s little sister who Veronica and Duncan found locked in the walls of her bedroom. She said she used to have dreams about Veronica coming back and saving her, which of course just makes Veronica feel guilty.
Grace tells Veronica that, after Meg died, her parents got even worse and she moved out the day she turned 18. Her parents refused to help pay for college and she couldn’t get student loans or scholarships because they would take one look at how much her dad made and determine he could afford to pay tuition without any help. That doesn’t make any sense though, because I had a friend whose parents fully funded the first four years of her college education, but refused to pay for her fifth year, so she she got all the scholarship and loan help she could even though her dad could afford to pay. But, whatever.
Anyway, so Grace had started working as a prostitute to pay her way through college, until she was raped, beaten into a coma, and left for dead, which tends to put an end to one’s sex work, at least for a while, if not permanently. So she’s working as a waitress in a nearby diner, which isn’t enough to pay her tuition bills, so she’s taking some time off, but I hope she’ll continue to pop up in the show.
Logan comes back briefly in the second book, but then redeploys again fairly quickly and Veronica realizes it’s just something she’ll have to get used to. But before he leaves, the two of them get a puppy together and even the descriptions of how adorable she is were enough to make me melt.