comedy

Harmony buys an old dress and when she puts it on she has a psychic vision.  She leaves her family's vintage clothing store and heads out to an island in the Atlantic Ocean off of Salem, Massachusetts.

Annette Blair has taken the Witch World by storm. 

Storm is the second triplet to have her story told.  She has blue hair, tats, and she hears a baby crying whenever she is near Aiden.

In order to stop the baby from crying she must lead Aiden to it.

Victoria owns a vintage clothing store in Salem, Massachusetts.  When she is emotional she speaks in rhymes and strange things happen.

Rory is a rugged Scot.  He is a wood carver who builds and/or restores carousel horses.  His village is dwindling and he believes if he can find a special carousel horse his great, great built, he can save his village. 

Oh how I adore Stephanie Plum!  This was book #12.5 - a 'between the numbers' novel, as they're called.  It was short and sweet, and absolutely hysterical!

     I've been a fan of Jennifer Crusie's for a long time now; as for Bob Mayer, I leapt to fandom with the release of the first collaboration between these two ~ Don't Look Down. In fact, the two books written by this duo are the only books that I actually happily got in hardcover ~ and that's a rarity indeed.
      I've got two of Mayer's Dave Riley books and I'm seriously looking for the rest... but I have to say that they're extremely hard to come across.  The two that I do have I got from his website. 
As funny as Crusie's stories are, Mayer's are serious thrillers, but the two of them combined write killer stories that just cannot be read, at least by me, without a great deal of semi-hysterical laughter and plenty of out-and-out guffawing.  Man, hard to believe that two such diverse authors can write stories that are seamlessly crafted stories and seem to be very much the work of one marvelously talented author.

RATING:
Excellence: Excellent to Outstanding ~ 4.5 stars
Steaminess: Sensual

What happens when a repressed photographer, his box-shaped dog and a secret formula that makes flesh vanish come together?  Ask his hapless wife and the most depraved couple in New York City!

Thorne Smith does it again, with the tale of a statue come to life, a pool that is a veritable Fountain of Youth, a wealthy old man, his wife, and his mistress, a lusty French maid, a half-crazed Japanese butler, a seller of rare pornography and the local fire department,  and what happens when all these things come together.

Hilarity ensues when stuffy coffee magnate Peter Van Dyke, his frigid fiance Yolanda, his passionate secretary Josephine DuVal, a pickpocket and a Bishop are all lost on the fogbound Hudson Bay, and get taken prisoner by one of the maddest nudist colonies ever to remove clothing.

Alas, Thorne Smith did not finish this book before he died; it was taken up by Norman Matson.  The style is rather different, although there is still enough of Thorne Smith's racy humor to satisfy. 

 This book was made into a movie:  I MARRIED A WITCH

The sequel to TOPPER bring Cosmo Topper, longing for his old adventures with the ghosts of Marion and George Kirby, to the French Riviera.  Alas, since he has come with his stodgy wife, who has quickly acreted a circle of equally stodgy new friends around them, his closest brush with adventure comes with watching The German Model slowly losing more and more of her bathing outfit as she pursues a