Last week the Fitbit Charge HR my boyfriend got me for Christmas finally arrived, and I’ve been loving it. It tells me how long I slept and how restless or not I was. If I go for a run, I can see a graph of my heart rate. It tells me how many flights of stairs I climb in a day (though sometimes that’s wildly inaccurate and I haven’t yet figured out why). It has a vibrating alarm, which wakes me up without generally waking up my boyfriend. And it tells me how many steps I’ve taken a day, and buzzes when I hit the default goal of 10,000. None of which has anything to do with the first Veronica Mars book, The Thousand Dollar Tan Line, except to say that I started reading it on the train home from Pennsylvania on Sunday and was so into it that I finished it yesterday evening, choosing to curl up on the couch with it despite the fact that I hadn’t even hit 6500 steps for the day.
That said, I don’t think I would have been so into this book if I weren’t already a fan of Veronica Mars and her world: my boyfriend introduced me to the television show (which he’d already watched in its entirety) and we watched the three seasons of the show, plus the movie, together over the past few years. The show/movie/book are all set in the fictional beachside town of Neptune, California, where the very rich party in their mansions, and where Veronica, in high school, found herself transformed from popular girl to pariah when her dad, as sheriff, went after one of the most powerful families in town. The show is set when Veronica’s in high school and in her first year of college, helping her dad (who’s now a private investigator) with cases, and solving crimes on her own, too. The movie’s set ten years after Veronica’s high school graduation, when she finds herself back in Neptune/investigating another crime, despite having left and being on the verge of a high-powered law career in New York. The book picks up two months after the movie left off, with Veronica in Neptune, trying to make a go of it as a PI.
At the start of the book, three college girls visiting Neptune for spring break (lots of parties, lots of drinking) realize they haven’t seen or heard from the fourth girl in their group for two days. They all went to a wild party in a mansion, but one of them didn’t come back to their motel room afterwards. Veronica ends up being hired by the Chamber of Commerce to find her: they’re losing money on cancelled spring break trips. As Veronica looks for the missing girl, Hayley, she finds herself in possession of possibly dangerous knowledge about the criminal connections of the owners of the house where that wild party was held. As the plot progresses, there are new developments and twists, but it’s hard to say more without spoilers, and this is, after all, a mystery. The plot is most of the appeal here: the writing is not amazing. It’s not bad (though at the end I wished I’d kept track of every time the word “instinctively” was used, because it felt like a lot), but it’s not what kept me turning pages. I did appreciate certain moments of dialogue or passages that read like Veronica’s thoughts: I found myself imagining them spoken by Kristen Bell or other actors from the show, and feeling pleased by the humor or pacing of them.
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