Let’s hear it for light reading!

Escape the suspense of your own life with a girl detective novel, specifically Thousand-Dollar Tan Line by Rob Thomas and Jennifer Graham.

My apologies to fans of the Veronica Mars TV series. I missed that show. If you already know her backstory, or if the series wrote it differently than the book, you may skip this paragraph. But for the rest of us: Veronica left her hometown to attend Stanford, then Columbia Law. Then she ended up right back in her childhood bedroom, not practicing law. Her dad, a former sheriff, ran a PI firm. But after he suffered some . . . setbacks, Veronica stepped into the family business.

Anyway, in Tan Line, it’s spring-break week in sunny Neptune, California. The beaches are crowded. The booze flows freely. Until a couple girls turn up missing.

A concerned citizen whose bottom line depends on three weeks of hard-partying college kids turns to Veronica for help.

Can Veronica convince the sheriff to let her “interfere”? Can she crack the hottest spring break party, in a bikini, and pass as a vapid coed? What juicy research will her tech-savvy assistant turn up? Do the family members of the missing girls look appropriately sad? Or shifty-eyed? Will Neptune quiet down, even at 3 o’clock in the morning?

When Veronica steps into the bad guy’s lair, will she make it out alive?

From the best hotel in Neptune, its lobby strangely quiet given the crime wave, to the “crackle of radios” at a fresh crime scene, to the interrogation room, where a lawyer whispers advice to his client, Tan Line is a palatable way to forget about masks, shortages and Facebook arguments.

Who among you, dear readers, has actually gone on a college-style spring break? And is it as R-rated as Thomas and Graham portray it? Not that they dwell on it. They just kind of . . . set the scene.

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