Picture posted to remind me never to pick up author again

One For the Money by Janet Evanovich
Audiobook version. Abandoned circa Chapter 3.

I might have gotten farther on paper, but not much farther. 
It's awful. No--it's not good enough to be awful. It's inane. And stupid.

I started off expecting a detective novel, a mistake which I don't blame anyone for except myself. The book started off with a brief description of the heroine's previous encounters with a neighborhood scumbag. He was interesting to read about, and she had a "one-hour-stand" with him and then got mad because he never called her.  How she handled her rancor was vaguely amusing.
And then the book jumps to now. Having lost her job and failing to find more than temp work, she has her car repossessed and goes to supper with her family. Her mom suggests she get a filing clerk job with her cousin Vinnie, a bail-bondsman.


I was about to quit there, but hmmm...bail bondsman and maybe some mob connections...might get better. She goes in, finds that the job is taken, but meets Vinnie's secretary who says she should try instead for the job of skip tracer.  Skip tracing pays 10% of the bond and there's a case available right now--10 grand to pick up a murder suspect who's skipped out on a $100,000 bond.  Incidentally he is her old neighborhood scumbag acquaintance, now a cop. 

So, with no training, no experience, no fighting skills, and no clue, she jumps on it.  She figures she'll just pop over to his mother's house, ask where he's gone, call the cops to pick him up, and head to McDonald's for a well-deserved late breakfast.

As another reviewer said, she's a marshmallow.

On her first try, without any effort at all, she manages to find him. She loses him immediately, but it doesn't matter.  I've lost interest. This is just stupid.

I went back and looked at other people's reviews. A quarter of them (for example the brainy Stephanie Meyer of Twilight fame) said Evanovich was a great author and it was a great book. Equally as many said it was crap and cited the same reasons I did. They also noted that the only interesting characters were dropped half-way through. All the more reason for me to cut my losses early.

if I'd paid money for this, I'd be PO'ed.