Fran and Ken Stein #2
There are several things a reader can expect when they pick up an E.J. Copperman book, among them humor, a tight plot and great characters. Also to be expected in each of his series, written as either Jeff Cohen or Copperman, is a high concept premise, and this instalment is no exception. The sibling protagonists, brother and sister Fran and Ken Stein (you get the word play), were not born, exactly, but created by their scientist parents who added a little extra something to the formula. The two of them are remarkably tall and strong, the downside being that they have to plug the USB port under their arms into a charger every couple of days to keep going. This part of the story was, to me, almost extraneous – the rest is so excellent that it needs no embellishment. Fran and Ken could just simply have been tall and extra strong and the book wouldn’t have suffered any. Being Copperman, however, there’s an extra emotional layer here as Fran and Ken haven’t seen their parents since they were children and are still hoping to find them. All signs point to that search being the plot of the next book. Their sense of loss is only lightly touched on here but it’s present and beautifully handled.
But at the end of the day this is simply a wonderful, complicated and funny mystery, which might remind the reader of Donald Westlake at his best. The story begins when a worried Dad comes to Fran (she and her brother own a private eye firm specializing in reuniting adopted children with their birth parents) telling her his daughter has vanished. She’d recently come out to her Dad as trans and he’s clearly struggling with it, but not to the point of rejecting his now daughter, who he obviously loves. This kind of contemporary thread grounds this book very much in the present.
Fran’s investigation takes her to the young woman’s college where she tries to track down her friends and luckily stumbles into one at the registrar’s office. The registrar is completely useless as far as Fran is concerned, but the young woman is not, and gives Fran her first lead.
Although Fran’s enhanced abilities don’t include Sherlock Holmes style investigative skills, she does discover a body in the course of her pursuit. The other hiccup in her life is the fact that she had been dating a cop, but when she told him about her reality (you know, the whole armpit USB port thing), he did a runner. The two now find themselves more or less forced to work together as Fran tries to locate the missing girl as well as discover a murderer. This development has all the charm and wit you might expect from Copperman.
While there’s some old-fashioned elements which could have come right from Westlake – a small-time criminal calling himself Jules, for instance – the contemporary timeliness of a trans character, the use of cell phones and social media and suchlike place this novel squarely in our present. The result is an insanely entertaining mashup of classic and cutting-edge tropes. The pages turned faster than I planned and when I finished the last one, I was already left feeling bereft, already missing Fran Stein and looking forward to more excellent instalments from E.J. Copperman. — Robin Agnew