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I have been reading some more Jennifer Crusie! Top-tier Jennifer Crusie, this time.

My favorite of the three was Faking It, which I devoured in a sitting on a plane ride today. It is definitely, DEFINITELY screwball -- 'let's have a running gag of calling each other by the names of side characters in screwball comedies' screwball -- and features the romance between Tilda, a reformed art forger desperate to recover some early false-identity paintings before they are exposed, and Davy, a reformed con artist that she meets in a closet belonging to the owner of the paintings while he is attempting to ineptly burgle the house at the exact same time that she is. SO MANY hijinks ensue. Also, so much time in the world's largest fictional closet. At one point three separate people are hiding in that closet and TWO OF THEM DON'T KNOW THE OTHER ONE IS THERE. I kept expecting them to find Narnia in the back of it.

This is also definitely another of my favorite kind of trapped-in-an-inn sort of comedy which features a number of zany side characters who all end up living in the same house with our leads, including:

- Tilda's sister Eve, a nice kindergarten teacher who has a wild dance club alter ego named Louise; it has reached the point where people buy Eve and Louise separate Christmas presents
- Eve's best friend and ex-husband, Andrew, who owns the night club where Louise works and is hypocritically a little concerned about Louise's wild ways
- Andrew's very nice new lawyer husband Jeff, whom everybody loves and relies on in his role as (ironically) the zany family's token straight man
- Eve and Andrew's teenage daughter Nadine, who is constantly trying on boyfriends in an attempt to see if their career paths will suit her; Nadine and her boyfriend du jour are also constantly accompanied by Nadine's loyal retainer who appears to be perfectly content with his lot as the one permanent member of Nadine's rotating harem
- Tilda's mother, who channels all her frustration at being fifty-something and trapped in an art gallery she hates into constantly tearing through Double Acrostics until she finds herself suddenly caught in a dramatic love triangle between
- the boring rich man who owns all the paintings that Davy and Tilda keep attempting to burgle
- and the cute hit man who might be attempting to murder Davy and is definitely attempting to get Tilda's mom to come away with him to Aruba

And these are just relatively major characters, and does not even mention Davy's father who seduces the depressing painter who lives upstairs, and Eve/Louise's temporary love interest who hasn't yet figured out they're the same person, and the caterer who is secretly an FBI agent, and -- I mean, there are five billion things going in in this book and they're all completely ridiculous, but it's all super cute family-who-cares-about-each-other ridiculous which is just about my favorite kind of ridiculous.

Welcome to Temptation, to which Faking It serves as a sequel, is also very much about families, but rather less zany (although not zero amounts of zany.) Welcome to Temptation stars Davy's sisters Sophie and Amy, who have been hired to come to small-town Temptation in order to shoot some very tasteful soft-core porn. The love interest is the town's single dad mayor, and the book's emotional focus is on figuring out how to break out of dysfunctional family patterns without completely destroying the important relationships at the heart of them, which is one of the reasons it feels more serious and bittersweet than Faking It despite the fact that the actual plot is "SMALL TOWN SCANDALIZED WHEN ASSHOLE FOUND MURDERED AT PORN SHOOT."

The best part of this book is definitely the end, when ( spoiler )

And then there is Bet Me, perhaps the first Jennifer Crusie I have read that features no dead bodies, gangsters, or hit men whatsoever! Instead it has a lot of good solid adult important friendships, which is actually really nice to read about. It is probably also the most satisfying of the three as romance, with a nice slow-developing Beatrice and Benedick kind of trust-and-friendship-out-of-irritable-rivalry thing. I keep trying to come up with a pithy summary of the plot, but there isn't one really -- mostly it's really just various scenes of Min and Cal and their pals hanging out and forming one friendship-family out of what was previously two friendship-families, held together with a great deal of banter.

(...that said, I realize what Crusie was going for with the whole 'Cal appreciates chubby Min's body exactly the way it is and therefore pushes her to eat what she wants,' I know the sexy donuts thing worked for many people as body positivity, but dang, DO NOT SHOVE FOOD INTO SOMEONE'S MOUTH IF THEY'VE SAID THEY DO NOT TO EAT THE FOOD, do not do this, consensual donut eating only please!)

Before my last big work trip, I got out a Jennifer Cruise four-in-one bundle from the library, because the library had it in e-book and I figured I would need something escapist to read on my travel adventures.

...that was a much simpler time, when I really believed my biggest stressor this fall was going to be too many transcontinental flights, but we'll let this pass for now. Anyway! Jennifer Crusie, her earliest endeavors. This four-pack includes:

Getting Rid of Bradley: in which a woman who has finally ended her relationship with her ex-husband, Terrible Controlling Bradley, finds out he might be involved in Shady Dealings by virtue of accidentally attacking the policeman investigating the aforementioned Shady Dealings. The policeman then moves into her house as a bodyguard and decides he loves a.) her, b.) domesticity, c.) her dogs, in approximately that order. Eventually they adopt more dogs. It's quite cute.

Strange Bedpersons: in which a liberal teacher becomes the fake fiancee of her conservative lawyer love interest, with a side plot about our heroine Tess taking on a neoconservative author who's written a book making fun of the activist fairy tale that inspired her as a kid. I was kind of :/ about this one even before political happenings in the US made it completely impossible for me to find Conservative Lawyer Nick in ANY WAY appealing as a love interest for Tess. On the other hand, all the scenes in which Nick attempts to do something that he thinks he is helpful that in fact is wildly contrary to Tess' interests or style while his uber-efficient secretary is like 'this is a bad idea, she won't like this, LET ME JUST DO SOMETHING FOR HER THAT SHE'LL LIKE' gave me a great alternate ship. Has anyone written the billionaire romance novel in which the billionaire's uber-efficient secretary who is effectively running the romance for him ends up stealing the heroine out from under his nose? Someone should write that billionaire romance novel.

What the Lady Wants: a love letter to noir, in which a femme fatale hires a PI to investigate her uncle's murder!! ... except she's secretly pretty sure that he wasn't actually murdered, she just wants to find a missing document, and the PI is actually just a real estate agent who's taken a year off to play PI on a bet. Also, gangsters. The noir trappings in this one are fun even if I did not like the hero at all; I think Jennifer Crusie was going for 'fun forties banter' but he tipped a little too far over into asshole early on for me and never quite pulled himself out enough.

Charlie All Night: in which love and hijinks among the oddballs who work at a local radio station! So of course I was going to like this one. Our heroine is a producer; our hero is the new late-night radio host who is secretly only there to investigate crimes at the station and does not actually want to be famous or successful at all, but it is TOO LATE, curse his velvety chocolate voice! Also notable for the fact that a.) it includes an actual gay character and b.) notably in a collection that also includes Getting Rid of Bradley and What the Lady Wants (theft! gangsters! murder!), the crime in this book just turns out to be that ( spoilers )

Over the course of reading these four books -- plus Agnes and the Hitman, which I also read, on which more anon -- I have learned that Jennifer Crusie really likes the following tropes in her romance:

- evil ex-boyfriends
- adorable failboat dogs
- murder
- fake dating
- screwball hijinks
- surprise bodyguarding
- weird but lovable gangster uncles
- women who have a Personal and Easily Identifiable Style (this one stood out to me just because, while I think I have a style, it encompasses a WIDE ARRAY of types and shapes of garments, so 'only ever wears twirly sundresses, looks super notable in a fitted skirt!' stood out to me because .. I wear both ......)
- dudes who have emphatically zero interest in long-term romantic commitment with anyone on page one, and have decided they're definitely going to marry the heroine by page one hundred (well before the heroine has decided she has any interested in marrying them back)

And for the record, yes, I know, I have it on everyone's authority that Faking It and Bet Me are the best ones, I have Bet Me out from the library now (see: stressors, escapism, YOU ALL KNOW WHAT'S UP), but at the time I needed the maximum amount of Jennifer Crusie for the minimum amount of hassle. It was a very long plane ride.