SVU #34: Spy Girl
I'm back again with another recap/attempt to revive this wonderful community! This book is the second in a miniseries that started with Out of the Picture, where everyone's trying to solve a murder mystery even though they all suck at it.
I don't know what the point of this cover picture is. There's only one scene where Jessica talks on the phone, and it's not really pivotal to anything that happens in the book. If they wanted a cover that conveys the tone of the story, they should have shown Tom and Elizabeth brooding angrily while a bunch of wealthy, vapid brats look on.
We begin with Tom doing research at the library, like any good murder mystery should start. He's technically searching for clues about a suspicious death at Verona Springs Country Club, but mostly he's angsting about Elizabeth's new relationship with her fellow Sweet Valley Gazette reporter Scott Sinclair. Tom fumes as he remembers how Scott was (gasp!) holding her hand. Guys, for Liz I'm pretty sure that's third base, so I can see Tom's point here.
Tom is using Dana as a cover so he can visit the country club using a couple's membership and also using her to try to make Elizabeth jealous. Tom briefly wonders if he's being fair to Dana. Just to summarize, Tom is stringing along a girl he knows is in love with him in order to further his journalistic ambitions and piss off his ex-girlfriend. What part of this seems fair, Tom?
Tom recaps a scene from the previous book where all four (Tom, Dana, Elizabeth, and Scott) were in a garden maze at the club when "suddenly, an elderly Latino gardener had appeared." That sentence is not nearly as exciting as you think it is, ghostwriter. The gardener gives them all a cryptic warning that they should go back to school and get away from the country club, and while it sounds really ominous I'm sure the gardener just wants to do his job without a bunch of self-absorbed teenagers trampling all over his hard work.
Tom goes over the case again for the reader's benefit, summarizing that a caddy was found drowned at the club and another caddy was being held for questioning. That's pretty much it, so Tom goes back to wondering if investigating the case might put Elizabeth in danger. Tom, you've been a character in this series long enough that you know the answer to that is always going to be yes.
One paragraph later, Tom switches from worrying about Elizabeth's safety to angrily declaring war on her. He's furious that after he dumped Liz for (accurately) accusing his father of stalking her, she briefly got back together with Todd and is now with Scott. Yeah, how dare she move on after you treated her like shit!
Meanwhile, Elizabeth is at the SVU coffee shop, telling Scott off for kissing her in the previous book. It turns out that they aren't really dating; they, like Tom and Dana, are posing as a couple in order to infiltrate the country club. Also like Tom and Dana, only one of them seems to realize that they're only pretending. In this case, it's Scott that's pushing the boundaries and Liz is having none of it. "He had an unwelcome habit of stepping into her personal space." To be fair, Liz, your personal space bubble has a ten foot radius.
Of course, because the Sweet Valley University campus is the size of a postage stamp, Tom is also at the coffee shop. Either Scott sees him or is just plain obnoxious, because we are told he is "loud and...aggressive," "bellowing," and "practically shouting" at Elizabeth about how print news (i.e., the Sweet Valley Gazette) is way better than television news (i.e., WSVU, Tom's college TV station). Apparently Scott is unfamiliar with subtlety.
Elizabeth sees Tom storm out and follows him, but Tom just snarls at her about all the "cracks" she'd made about him. Except that Scott was the one making fun of TV news, while Liz sat quietly and even tried to defend it. Tom is as big a fan of accuracy as Scott is a fan of tact. They must be absolutely brilliant journalists. Elizabeth quickly starts snapping back at him, and our manufactured conflict is well underway.
To save time recapping later, every time Tom and Elizabeth interact the sequence goes from secret attraction to tempers flaring and "my reporting skills could beat up your reporting skills." There's zero middle ground between the two extremes. The sole plot points are: 1) Tom and Elizabeth's star-crossed romance and 2) Tom and Elizabeth competing over the same dead caddy story. I'm getting that out of the way now because I'm going to skip over a lot of it in this book. Just assume that it happens whenever Liz and Tom are in the same place together...because it does.
Next we switch to a Lila scene, but before you get too excited I need to warn you that Lila is at her least Lila-like in this book. To help me make it through the whole thing I decided to pretend that this Lila is an imposter and the real Lila is off having fabulous adventures somewhere while everyone else squabbles about solving the murder mystery. I know that's what I'd do.
Anyway, Fake Lila is at Verona Springs, fretting about whether two of the country club snobs (Bunny and Pepper) are going to kick her out of the club because Bunny has a grudge against Bruce over a past bad date. Pepper and Bunny arrive, "Lila" kisses their asses like the imposter we know her to be, and Pepper asks Lila to organize the pairings for the mixed doubles tennis tournament. "Lila" is for some reason thrilled to do this menial task.
In the parallel Sweet Valley story I'm writing in my head while I read this crap, the real Lila just climbed Mount Everest without breaking a sweat, then planted a flag that says "Property of Miss Lila Fowler."
On to Nick Fox, Jessica's boyfriend and an inexplicably competent member of the Sweet Valley Police Department. He calls Jessica to ask her to do an undercover mission with him, and I'm not even going to bother to point out the flaws with that plan. I will point out that Jessica is working on a history paper, and both she and Nick are surprised to find out that there was a king with six wives. How the hell have they both reached adulthood without once hearing about Henry the Eighth?
Anyway, Jessica eagerly takes him up on the offer, but Nick is worried that Jessica might get hurt. "Sometimes he thought she didn't realize his job involved life-and-death danger; it was nothing like the movies." Because the cops in movies spend all their time doing boring paperwork in complete safety? I feel like maybe Nick needs to watch Die Hard.
Tom is snooping around the country club in search of the Cryptic Elderly Gardener of Doom when a "beefy man" with "huge forearms roped with muscles" stops him. It's the club's golf pro, and I admit I had an entirely different impression of the kind of body golfers have. The golf pro gets very menacing when Tom asks about the gardener, but Tom manages to get away before he gets a golf club shoved anywhere unpleasant.
Jessica goes to Isabella to ask for help, and I squee a little because we get a makeover scene! For some reason Jessica thinks Nick wants her to go undercover as a sleazy biker chick, so the two girls put together a disguise with vinyl pants and spray-on black hair dye.
Tom bumps into "Lila," Bunny, and Pepper, and the girls get suspicious of Tom's membership since he's there on a couple's membership but has no girlfriend in sight. Of course, the girls are also currently not with their boyfriends, either, but Tom doesn't think to point that out. Instead, he decides to drag poor Dana back into his shenanigans. He thinks, "Was it fair to keep using her as his cover?" Again, Tom. You already know the answer to that. Bastard.
Elizabeth and Scott are, of course, also at the country club in search of clues. They run into the same body-building golf pro from earlier, and pretend they're doing a feature story about the club's geraniums. When they ask about the elderly gardener the caddy points out Tom and says he was also looking for him. Tom pretended to want to return a pocketknife, which she thinks is lame. Well, they can't all be as diabolically clever as your geraniums story, Liz.
Tom calls Dana on the phone and talks her into meeting him at the country club. Dana thinks it's odd that he starts off distant, but is suddenly lovey-dovey after a brief pause. The change is because Tom noticed partway through the conversation that Elizabeth and Scott were nearby, so he started laying it on thick. Dana, of course, is delighted that Tom is both in love with her and completely bipolar.
Jessica, in her biker chick disguise, is waiting to meet Nick in the seedy part of town. I don't know why Nick asked her to meet him there when either Jessica's dorm or the police station would have made more sense. Besides, I'm more surprised by the fact that Sweet Valley has a seedy part of town--grimy windows, pawn shops, off-track betting parlors, boarded-up liquor stores, and all. All that's missing is a random Kelly's shout-out.
Jessica gets accosted by some lowlifes who mistake her for a hooker. Hookers in Sweet Valley--now my mind is really blown. She's mad at Nick, thinking he's expecting her to work vice, but she's apparently forgotten that the trashy makeover was her idea, not his. Jess, keep up with your own scheming, please. She looks around for help, but all she sees is a "pathetic-looking nerd" who is oddly muscular. Three guesses who's under that clever disguise.
Meanwhile, Elizabeth and Scott ask "Lila" (who's wearing a lime green sundress, so at least the imposter did her research) if they can compete in the doubles tournament. They want to use the tournament to snoop around the other players, but Elizabeth is annoyed when Scott tells "Lila" that they're a couple. Goddammit, Liz, either you're pretending to be a couple or you aren't. Then again, this hot-and-cold thing is par for the course whenever Liz is in a real relationship, so maybe it's just method acting.
Later, a very excited "Lila" finds Bruce and asks him to guess what she's happy about. He asks if they've won the lottery and she replies, "Why would I get excited about that? This is important news." Okay, that actually was kind of funny. Is that you, Real Lila? I missed you so much!
She tells him about signing up Liz and Scott for the tournament, which doesn't seem very exciting except that Scott bribed her to let them in with the promise of a feature story focused on her. That, too, does seem in-character for Lila. We also get a random Winston Egbert mention here, and now I kind of wish he was in this book. Maybe he's hanging out somewhere with the real Lila?
Back at the dark criminal underworld of Sweet Valley, Jessica and Nick (for yes, the nerd is Nick in disguise) are each still standing on the same street corner waiting for the other to arrive. Nick convinces himself that Jessica is Nancy Daryl, a hardened criminal that swore revenge on him by saying "It'll be curtains for you, copper" because she's a 1930s gangster. I'm over this "wacky" scene already, by the way.
Back at the country club, Bruce is lounging on the patio when Bunny shows up and begins insulting him while talking up her fiancé, Paul Krandall. Paul is such a clumsy airhead that he might as well be a cartoon character, and even though he's already in a relationship Bruce's ego is enraged. "Nobody can prefer a doofus like Krandall to a Patman and get away with it!" he thinks. Wow, there's a lot to unpack right there. Let's go with "Bruce is a loon" and leave it at that.
Meanwhile, "Lila" is arranging the pairings for the tennis tournament when Pepper arrives and bitches her out because she wants the tournament arranged so that certain people are matched with bad players to ensure that they win. She implies that if "Lila" doesn't fix the tournament then she'll get kicked out of the country club.
"Lila" is understandably confused, since this is the first she's heard about any of this. Jesus, Pepper, it might help if you'd told her what you wanted in the first place! "Lila" is worried that Ace Reporter Elizabeth is going to catch on, and I think she's waaaaay overestimating Liz's journalistic skills.
Back in my imagination, the real Lila just attended an art auction and bought an original Picasso at a bargain price because no one there dared to bid against her.
Later, Elizabeth watches as the country club snobs insult the (mostly Latino) wait staff with comments like "chico" and "none of them can speak proper English." She thinks sanctimoniously about how terrible they are, but doesn't actually, you know, speak up. See, Liz is just nice enough to get mad about racism but not nice enough to actually do anything about it.
She gets up to take a walk and ends up going into a greenhouse, where someone closes the door behind her. She panics when she hears footsteps nearby and sees someone out of the corner of her eye, but no one replies when she calls out. When a hand grabs her shoulder, she faints. So much for our brave, tough reporter, I guess.
It turns out the hand belongs to Tom, who carries her out of the greenhouse. He gets into an argument with Scott and finally admits that he was the creepy person who followed her into the greenhouse, although he fails to explain why he went in after her, not to mention why he didn't just speak up instead of skulking around like some kind of psycho.
"Lila" posts the pairings for the (now fixed) tournament, and there is a general wailing and gnashing of teeth as people freak out about how they're going to lose and that it obviously means their lives are completely ruined. He also notices that many of the people who have been set up to lose are older, implying that the country club wants to push out the older members in favor of younger ones. Because everyone knows that college students always have way more money and social status than middle-aged people, right?
Nick and Jessica still haven't figured out each other's disguise yet, and now Jessica thinks Nick is Rodney Putnick, a geek from high school that she pretended to be a nerd and hung out with so he'd help her with a biology paper. Which, what? I don't remember that SVH book, but I kinda want to read it now.
So both of these geniuses get progressively more nervous, with Nick thinking about Nancy's colleagues "Joey the Tuna," "Wall-eyed Eddy," and "Debster 'Dead Shot' Johnson." Listen, ghostwriter, if you aren't even going to take this seriously then I won't either. At last, after a frankly ridiculous confrontation, the penny finally drops and they figure it out.
Tom waits for Dana outside the employees' lounge when a waiter named Carlos invites him in and they begin a conversation. When Tom starts asking "subtle" questions relating to the dead caddy, Carlos plays dumb and Tom wonders if he's trying to hide something. Or maybe he's not as interested in gossiping with strangers as you are, Tom. Not to mention he might have been friends with the guy and you're poking at a sore point.
Bruce and "Lila" walk onto the tennis court to play against Bunny and Paul, and Lila finally tells Bruce that she fixed the tournament and they have to lose the game. It seems like there must have been a better time to discuss this, such as any other time prior to this moment. Bruce, of course, is having none of it and proceeds to wipe the court with Bunny and the not-so-comically clumsy Paul.
"Lila," still desperate to stay in the country club's good graces for reasons I can't even begin to understand, sabotages them by refusing to play and, when Bruce catches on and starts playing her side as well, playing even worse than Paul. Which means she's playing very conspicuously badly in front of Elizabeth, so I guess she's no longer worried about Liz figuring out the match is fixed? She should have just yelled, "Look out! A bird!" to distract Bruce.
Basically, this whole scene goes from over-the-top slapstick to virtually unreadable until Lila finally gives Bruce an ultimatum: lose the match or she'll dump him. Bruce gives in and throws the game. It takes a surprising amount of effort for them to actually lose, because Paul is literally tripping over his own feet and I'm amazed he can even function in day-to-day life. I also have to wonder: people can get kicked out of Verona Springs for being old or for winning a tennis game, but not for looking like complete spazzes in public? I don't get country club rules.
The real Lila, in my head, just discovered a priceless ancient artifact while she happened to be scuba diving in the Great Barrier Reef.
In the bleachers, Elizabeth and Scott are watching this shitshow play out. Scott finds it hilarious, and Liz is pissed off at him for it. "Tom would never waste valuable research time like this," she thinks. I love that Liz counts being boring and avoiding fun as a desirable trait in a partner.
Dana arrives at the tennis match and sees Elizabeth right away. She then spends--literally--more than two pages melodramatically dithering about whether to look to see if Tom is with her. Two. Pages. Spoiler alert: she looks, and he isn't. You're welcome. She finds Tom, who again reflects that he's really not into her and "hated leading her on, but he needed her in order to pursue his story." Just in case you forgot, Tom is a complete douchebag.
Back to Nick and Jess. Nick tells Jessica that he wants to go undercover at the country club, and Jessica reluctantly admits that Lila knows she's planning an undercover mission with Nick so their cover will be blown the moment she sees them. Then she comes up with an outrageous and crazy plan, because the previous wacky plan went off soooo well.
That night, Scott walks Elizabeth back to her dorm while they discuss their next move: interviewing the club manager. Their strategy is to mention the drowning and assure the manager that anything he says is off the record. Brilliant idea! That way if he tells you anything useful, you won't be able to use it in your newspaper story! Oh. Wait.
Elizabeth is distracted by their cunning plan by the library lights in the distance. "Tom has a new love now, they seemed to say." Are they saying it in Morse Code? I have no idea how Liz got that very specific message from a bunch of lights. She "felt as if she was the only single person out there." Oh, no! Single? In Sweet Valley? Anything but that!
Apparently Scott wants to help with that, because when Elizabeth starts to go up to her dorm room he pins her against the wall and leans in for a kiss. Now, I get that Liz tends to run a bit hot and cold, but throughout this book she's been pretty clear on the "we're only pretending to be a couple at the country club, so please don't try to make out with me without my permission" stance. Back the hell off, Scott.
Meanwhile, Tom and Danny are in their dorm room, talking about Dana. Danny makes an offhand comment about redheads, and Tom corrects him--Dana's hair is mahogany. Not only is it unlikely that any guy would be able to recognize the color mahogany, let alone use it in conversation, but the word "mahogany" is used to describe Dana's hair no less than four times in this book, plus once to describe a table. I think I can guess the ghostwriter's favorite color.
Anyway, this scene only exists so that Tom can elaborate more on his feelings for Liz and lack of feelings for Dana, so I'm skipping ahead to Elizabeth still getting creeped on by Scott. She ducks under his arm and hurries up to her room, where Jessica is trying to sneak out with a huge suitcase. Elizabeth accuses Jess of taking both her own clothes and Liz's, which Jessica scoffs at because of how different their fashion styles are. Except that the entire Sweet Valley series is riddled with examples of Jessica stealing Elizabeth's clothes, so I call shenanigans.
Just a side note: it took until page 143 to get to the "same but different" bit, which seems ridiculous. If you're going to get almost entirely through the book before describing the twins, is it really worth it by that point?
Jessica is leaving to prepare her disguise with Isabella, but neither twin is willing to tell the other what's going on because plot contrivance, I guess. Jess and Izzy turn Jessica into an Argentinian heiress named Perdita del Mar by putting her in exotic clothes and dying her hair black, which is pretty much exactly what Jessica did in "The New Jessica," so everyone who sees her is more likely to assume she's just having another identity crisis. I guess she's relying on her (cringeworthy) accent to fool them all?
The next morning, Jessica meets Nick at a diner, where he approaches "like a panther in the jungle." So...on all fours? She shows off her new disguise, strutting up and down and giggling when the other customers begin whistling and catcalling. You're a real boon to feminism, Jess.
At the country club, Paul offers Bruce a tennis rematch and Bruce, still furious about having to throw the game, eagerly accepts. Paul also suggests wagering ten dollars per game. Instead of laughing off such chump change, Bruce accepts. Do people that rich even carry such small denominations around with them?
Tom is also back at the country club, apparently stalking Carlos. He sees various employees giving Carlos money, which Tom starts asking questions about. Because it's definitely any of his business. It's scenes like this that make me see why Tom and Liz think they're meant to be--they share a deep love of butting into other people's personal lives. Carlos shiftily says he's collecting money for a gift for a coworker's wedding. Instead of feeling suspicious of this obvious lie, crack detective Tom pitches in ten dollars and writes "Buena Suerte" on the bill.
Now it's Nick's turn for a makeover, and if you thought Jess's new clothes and hair dye were a flimsy excuse, get a load of Nick's...trimmed hair and preppy outfit. Oh, and he puts on a pair of glasses. Even Lois Lane could see through this one.
Elizabeth shows up for her interview with the club manager and overhears him talking to his secretary about Manuel Coimbra, a busboy who left without notice a few weeks ago and is still receiving mail. Liz puts on an empty-headed persona for the secretary, but I think the act is a little closer to reality than she'd like to admit. The interview itself is a bust, but she steals the envelope holding Manuel's mail. She struggles about this for some time because she's still pretending to have ethics after lying and misrepresenting herself in pursuit of a news story.
Bruce is still stomping Paul on the tennis court when Paul suggests increasing the bet to one hundred dollars a game. Bruce takes him up on it, but not before a twinge of conscious that's so out of character I start to wonder if he's an imposter, too.
Jessica and Nick arrive at the country club in disguise, with Jessica laying on the flamboyant Argentina heiress act as thick as possible without actually breaking out into a song from Evita. Everyone in the room apparently thinks she's the best thing since insider trading, and not one person demands to know just what the hell Jess is trying to pull. Jessica has to whisper instructions and corrections to Nick as they eat so he'll blend in, and I realize that Nick decided to go undercover at a country club without so much as cracking an etiquette book.
Back at the tennis game, Paul is suddenly beating Bruce handily without breaking a sweat. It takes Bruce an absurdly long time to work out he's been hustled, but the penny finally drops after Bunny emerges, clapping derisively. Apparently this was an elaborate revenge scheme that required Paul to pretend to be a hopeless klutz without a brain for the entire book up to this point. Not only does this seem ridiculously elaborate, but Bunny must be phenomenal in bed to convince Paul to go along with it for so long.
Bruce writes Paul a check and vows glorious revenge, which in a different book would turn out awesome because Bruce revenge should mean paper cup booze and badass leather jackets and lethal pool pushes and maybe even some explosions, but I've read ahead and I'll caution you right now not to get your hopes up.
Elizabeth, exhilarated and panicky over her brush with felonious mail theft, tries to tell Scott about it but he drags her to a table with Pepper, Pepper's boyfriend, and "Lila." Jessica (as Perdita) and Nick (as Chip) soon join them, and I call extra-super-duper shenanigans because Elizabeth looks right at her own twin sister and doesn't even think she looks familiar. The hell?
Speaking of Jessica, she keeps almost blowing their cover by spouting made-up facts about Argentina that even the twits she's talking to know are wrong. She keeps making up even more elaborate lies to get out of it, and everyone believes her without question. By the time she forgets who Eva Peron was and everyone else just kind of shrugs it off, my suspension of disbelief snaps completely in half.
In between instances of each person being a complete dumbass, we keep getting internal monologue from different POV characters speculating about whether or not one of the people at the table might be the one who killed the caddy. Because the ghostwriter suddenly remembered that this book is supposed to be a murder mystery and now they're jamming in references to it at the last minute.
Bruce, Bunny, and Paul join the table and at one point Paul asks a waiter for "iced tea for everyone, répondez s'il vous plait." Nick wonders if he could really be "that dense." Dude, you just spent half an hour with people who swallowed stories about Africa importing its diamonds from Argentina, the word "amore" not really being Italian, and Argentina being famous for coconut milk instead of beef. This is the moment you start to think these people aren't very bright?
Jessica turns the conversation to crime, fishing for information about why the police would investigate the country club. Bruce leaves the table to call the police and leave an anonymous tip that Paul committed a robbery, and that's his entire revenge plot. Dammit, SVH Bruce would never be this lame!
Back at the table, Liz is freaking out because the others are starting to tease her about being a reporter and whether she knows anything about any crimes at the country club. Scott manages to distract them by asking about gossip, and Pepper points out a woman who has been married three times and each husband disappeared on the honeymoon. Scott jokes that maybe that's the gossip the police are investigating. Except that isn't gossip; it's just suspected triple homicide, so why would the police take an interest in that?
Elizabeth and Jessica start to leave the table at the same time and end up bonking heads. Elizabeth looks at "Perdita" again and finally--finally!--realizes that it's Jessica. "It took every ounce of strength to keep herself from fainting." What is it with Liz and fainting at the drop of a hat in this book? Does she have a blood pressure issue?
Elizabeth and Jessica play a game of cat-and-mouse as Jess tries to get away from Liz's snooping, but eventually Elizabeth corners her. Once again, neither is willing to tell the other what they're doing at the country club, so the whole scene ends up being pointless.
Elsewhere at the club, Dana is pouting and playing with Tom's shirt buttons and asking for some "cozy" alone time, and he feels "his back stiffen." You sure it's your back you're thinking of, Tom? Actually, he's annoyed because Elizabeth would never act like this. Duh, obviously Liz would never try to seduce you. It's Liz.
Dana tearfully tells him she feels like there are three people in their relationship: "Me, you, and Elizabeth." She wants there to be only two, and Tom agrees. As he makes out with her, he thinks, "He could never tell Dana which two he meant." In other words, the ghostwriter is making damn sure we all realize that Tom is still using Dana even though he has no feelings for her. Just in case you started to get confused and maybe almost like his character or something.
Elizabeth finally gets the chance to tell Scott about the mail she stole from the manager, but stops him from opening it because it would be "a federal offense." For crying out loud, Liz, you already broke the law by stealing it! You don't get bonus points for drawing the line now.
Tom later runs into Paul, who has locked his keys in his car. Tom offers to get a hanger from his car so they can unlock it, and Paul continues to act like an idiot by telling him he's got a hanger, too--in his car. When Tom points out that the car is locked, Paul agrees that they'd need another hanger to get his hanger out.
Time out. Is Paul actually an idiot or just pretending in order to hustle Bruce? He really has nothing to gain from fooling Tom, and later in the scene he uses the hanger expertly in a move that makes Tom suspicious, so this act no longer makes any sense.
Anyway. A police car pulls up at this point, and an officer talks to Paul about the robbery accusation. Paul pulls out a wad of cash but explains that he won it from Bruce in a bet. Bruce gets called to the parking lot, where the real story comes out and the police officer is angry. He tells Bruce that college kids hustling each other is not a crime, but I feel I should point out that betting on sporting events is technically illegal, especially since they're both (I assume) under 21. However, I wouldn't expect the Sweet Valley Police to know that, so I'll let it slide.
Paul slips the officer a twenty with some winking comments about the police benevolent association, which means the cops in Sweet Valley are not only incompetent and on the take, but also very cheap to pay off. Hold out for a hundred, man! These brats are loaded, remember? Tom thinks the whole exchange "hadn't felt right." It was a straight-up bribe, Tom. What part of that should have felt okay? He also notices the bill he wrote "Buena Suerte" on among Paul's wad of money.
Meanwhile, Elizabeth is sitting in her Jeep with Scott, watching Tom's conversation with Paul. She's irritated with Scott because he's trying to read Carlos's mail by holding it up to the light instead of joining her in her Tom-related nosiness. Way to be annoyed with the guy whose actually looking for clues instead of spying on his ex, Liz.
She decides to approach Tom and offer to share their information, but instead they end up almost making out. The "almost" is because Scott shows up just in time to cockblock, insinuating that Elizabeth was trying to seduce Tom in order to find out what he knows. Tom vows to "never trust Elizabeth Wakefield again," which is actually a good plan but I know it's not going to last.
And that's it for this book, and the miniseries concludes in Undercover Angels! Anyone else up for recapping a book that hasn't been done yet? I've got SVU books 36 and 38 on deck, so I'll be adding a few more recaps eventually.