SVU Thriller Edition: Running for Her Life
The book opens with Elizabeth and Tom Watts on a date at the movies. Elizabeth has apparently fallen asleep during the movie, which just makes me ask again: why is he with her? She’s not going to have sex with him, and she sleeps through their dates. Elizabeth does bring the LOL by eating a Milk Dud she finds in the pocket of her sweatshirt, which takes me back to FatLiz of freshman year, spraying perfume on Celine’s cookies so she doesn’t eat them. Those were the days. We don’t really learn much from this scene besides that, except that Jessica is obsessed with Julia Reynolds, star of Deadly Impact, a blockbuster that will be released by New Vision Studios in a few months. We cut to…
Jessica, being obsessed with Julia Reynolds, with her long auburn hair. Jess has apparently learned nothing from the time she was single white femaled by: Sandra Ferris, in Middle School, Paula and Margo, in high school, and The Roommate, at SVU and is trying to copy Julia Reynolds’s hairstyle and general look, in an attempt to become famous herself and to appeal to all those raping fratboys that stalk the SVU campus. Elizabeth comes in and tells her she looks just like Julia, and Jessica beams and reveals that she has apparently eschewed schoolwork once again to read up on the tiniest, most infinestimal details of Julia Reynolds’s life, and the fact that she, Jessica, plans on being the next Julia Reynolds. Hey you guys? I wonder if Julia Reynolds is going to be important in this story?
The next scene features characters we don’t yet know, and I really don’t know how we’re supposed to feel about them, because the language is really subtle. “Ronald Bishop,” a bigwig of Mammoth Pictures, is graying and plump, and we all know that in Sweet Valley fat = evil. Except when it = loser. Except when the person sheds that weight, when it = immediate hotness and popularity. “Bishop” is having a business meeting with somebody named “Pierce,” who is “timorous,” and that’s a pretty advanced word, even for SVU, so color me impressed, ghostwriter! This meeting is shades of Rod Blagojevitch, with Bishop outlining in not at all veiled terms some nefarious, dangerous plan he has concocted to take down New Vision Studios by this time tomorrow. Like, if Bishop was a mobster, instead of saying, “He sleeps with the fishes,” he would say, “I tied two concrete blocks to this bamas shoes and threw him in the river, until he drowned.” Bishop also smokes cigars and has a moustache, and part of me can’t help but picture it as one of those curly waxed moustaches that you see on villains in old silent films. Bishop is sitting there, twirling it, and cackling “Mwahahahaha!” while timorous Pierce shakes and sweats. Well, it doesn’t say that, but it’s totally implied.
We meet Julia long enough to meet her boyfriend, actor Matt Barron, and to learn that she is really polite to her help and that she’s going to married in a few weeks, which is supposed to make us sad when she dies one scene later. Here’s how it happens; it is awesome and amazing even by SV standards. They’re on the set of Deep Impact, Julia and Matt, and they’re filming a scene where Julia has to jump out of a window, and Matt, on the ground, sees that there’s a “huge tear” in the air mattress that she will land on. He points it out and they rush to fix it, but Julia doesn’t get in the message, and she stands up in the window to jump, because apparently she can’t see that there’s no air mattress to break her fall and they don’t have those little hand-held walkie-talkies to rely this vital piece of information. Here is my favorite line in the book so far: “Don’t…jump.” Matt spoke slowly and deliberately, concentrating all his energy on sending the message to her. “Slowly and deliberately?” How about “loudly,” dude? DON’T FUCKING JUMP! Julia jumps. Dies. Or-was she pushed? By now, 17 pages in, we know that 1) Julia was pushed and 2) It was Bishop who somehow did it, and that make me a little sad because this might have actually been a cool mystery. Not as cool as the time Bruce Patman was poisoned because someone wanted to steal his screenplay, and had only one day to find the antidote, but still. But if this was a real-life murder I would start telling everybody that there was a conspiracy, and it was really Matt Barron who did it. “Slowly and deliberately”-Jesus.
Apparently, the rest of the entire world has never read a Sweet Valley book, because they refuse to believe that Julia Reynolds was totally murdered, and think she committed suicide. Jessica has some sort of emotional breakdown when she hears and it’s really sad because her grief over this total stranger’s death totally eclipses any of the dead boyfriend aftermaths. She starts cutting pictures of Julia out of the magazines, all creepy stalker kidnapper style, and not eating. You guys can chalk it up to shoddy continuity by the ghostwriter, but I am just taking it as further proof that Jessica Wakefield is extremely fucked up in the head from all this terrible shit that’s been happening to her since sixth grade. After most of your boyfriends die and you’ve been shipwrecked and stalked and almost murdered countless times, you just aren’t right anymore. Poor girl.
Apparently, everybody at Mammoth Pictures and Murder Inc was in on the plot to kill Julia, because in the next scene they’re all sitting around a conference room congratulating each other on a job well done. It seems that their plan was to kill Julia, because she used to work for their studio and then left, and they want to stop their other stars from following her to New Vision, and the best way they could think of doing that was not to offer their stars more money or better perks but to kill somebody. Also, it was little timorous Pierce who pushed Julia, and I guess he’s not so timorous at all. He’s actually quite brazen. Antonym! He’s also quite stupid because when Bishop tells him that what he did was murder, he’s shocked, positively shocked, like he didn’t realize or know that before. Bishop has apparently given lots and lots of money to the governor, and so he’s able to convince him to drop any investigation into Julia’s death, even though famous actor Matt Barron calls the DA with a note he found that Julia wrote the day of her death, which proves she didn’t kill herself. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Sweet Valley has the crookedest, shadiest cops in the world.
So it’s Liz Wakefield to the rescue! When the cops won’t take your case, just call Sweet Valley’s perfect six size sleuth! Seriously, I don’t know why they don’t just fire everybody in the Sweet Valley police department and put Liz and Tom Watts in charge of crimefighting. It would save a lot of tax dollars because they’d do it for free, for sheer love of gossip and nosiness. Somehow, without even knowing about Bishop and Pierce, Elizabeth comes to the conclusion that there’s more to Julia’s death than there appears to be, and decides she’s going to get to the bottom of it. She reads one measly article on Julia’s departure from Mammoth Pictures and everything clicks into place, like, what are all of the rest of the reporters on the planet doing right now? Sitting around at the Algonquin and liberating the Paris Ritz from the Huns? How come they didn’t figure this out? There’s a funny scene where Tom and Nina lure Liz away from her investigative research with a piece of cake, because I guess if there’s one thing Elizabeth Wakefield loves more than poking her nose in someone else’s business it is food. Matt Barron also starts his own investigation, but because he is not Elizabeth, he is not very successful and keeps hitting dead ends.
Elizabeth writes a paper on her theory of Julia’s death for her journalism class (her professor’s name is Cynthia Zartman, which I found hilarious) and she calls it “The Suicide Paper,” which is just the kind of lack of imagination we’ve come to expect from Elizabeth “When We Are Afraid to Speak” Wakefield. And then that paper makes its convoluted way from Professor Zartman to a reporter named Kate Morgan, to Ronald Bishop, who, instead of reasoning that it’s just some silly kid’s theory about a crime, decides that he must immediately kill everyone who has ever touched The Suicide Paper. Because that won’t seem shady at all, if everybody who’s read about Mammoth Pictures’ hypothetical involvement in Julia Reynolds’ death suddenly turns up dead, themselves. He sends a package bomb to Prof. Zartman, has Pierce blow Kate Morgan’s brains out, but somehow Elizabeth, who wrote the paper, gets only her room messed up and some bullets shot into a poster on her wall as a warning. Even Bishop knows that St. Liz is worth more than everybody else around her.
When Elizabeth hears that Kate Morgan and Prof. Zartman are dead, she marches into the police department and demands they do something about it and they laugh at her and say no, pretty blatantly, and she is shocked, because she’s never dealt with the Sweet Valley cops before. Except oh, that’s right, she has. Many, many times. You’d think she’d know to skip the trip and save her gas money, by now. Or you think that the SV cops would know from previous experience that when Elizabeth Wakefield comes and tells them someone has committed a crime, it is as surefire a thing as in that movie when they used the psychic people to suss out crimes before they happened. But oh, well. There isn’t much time to dwell on this because Jessica and Isabella are at a coffee shop and Pierce comes in and tries to shoot Jessica in the head. Remember when I congratulated the ghostwriter on knowing what “timorous” means? I take it back. I don’t think she knows what it means, at all, actually. Anyway, Pierce thinks Jessica is Elizabeth, and he thinks that he’s killed her, because he doesn’t stick around to actually make sure he has before reporting to Bishop that she’s dead. So everything should be OK, except this story is like The Gift of the Magi in at least one respect, because the twins decide that they have to go underground just at the very moment when the guy trying to kill them decides to stop trying to kill them. Bless their hearts.
Where would you go in Sweet Valley if you were going underground? I’d make Lila Fowler fly me someplace amazing, or let me sleep in her second bedroom’s half-bath’s linen closet, which is probably nicer than my whole home as a unit. Elizabeth and Jessica make Tom drive them around in his car while they’re huddled in the backseat. And Ronald Bishop still thinks Elizabeth is dead, and doesn’t know about her twin, so he’s probably sitting in his office faxing things to people. It’s just a funny mental picture. The twins go to the Birchwood Motel, even though they have at least five rich friends who could fly them to an island country. I mean, there’s Lila, Bruce, Nicholas, Todd, and I’m sure Brooke Dennis would be understanding if they called her and asked Coco to hide them in the South of France, given that their lives are on the line. Except maybe she wouldn’t. If some bitches in 6th grade had fooled me into thinking they had a triplet, I’d be pissed for life. “Take that, you twin motherfuckers!” The most loltastic event of this entire book is when Elizabeth decides they need disguises and Jessica freaks out because she doesn’t want to dye her hair pumpkin orange. Nobody likes you, gingers! Not even when their lives are at stake!
Anyway, somebody named Gomez calls Matt Barron, and tells him that Elizabeth knows something about Julia’s death, so Matt starts looking for them. You know who else is? Pierce again. He’s been tipped off that he didn’t finish the job and he manages to track the twins down pretty immediately. He finds them in a diner and he’s about to kill them, but this horny waitress is hot for him, stops him, and flirts with him. I wonder if Elizabeth Wakefield would still think she was evil for having sex, even though this waitress’s sin just saved her life? The twins go back to their motel, and a strange man is hanging around outside the room, and they’re afraid, but it’s Matt! They run away from him, and Matt suddenly starts thinking that the reason they ran is because Elizabeth is the one who killed Julia. Wise up, Matt! Elizabeth Wakefield doesn’t kill people without Magic Vodka, and there hasn’t been any in this story! The twins flee for LA. Tom goes to their room, finds them gone, and calls Liz. She tells him to meet them on the Santa Monica pier, and Matt, who is hiding in the closet, vows to meet them there, too. So now the twins are running from two people! Running-for their lives.
There’s a funny scene at the carnival at the Santa Monica pier, where Liz and Jess are playing Skee Ball and eating fried dough and riding rollercoasters, but then Matt catches up with them, and things are tense until all is explained. And Jessica macks on him, even though his fiancée just was murdered like a week ago! Matt brushed against Jessica’s arm, leaving a tingling sensation that crawled all the way up to her neck…Jessica silently hoped she didn’t smell like vomit. Matt says he’ll take the twins to a hotel and my heart leaps for a moment, until I remember that this is Sweet Valley, and he’s probably smooth all the way down his body, like a Ken doll. In the room, he tells the twins that another star, Candice Johannsen, is thinking about leaving Mammoth Pictures, and that she could be killed any day now by Bishop and his crew. Jesus Christ! He’s just going to kill them all? I don’t think this guy has thought his plan through to the end. Matt takes the twins to the set of Candice’s new movie, so they can warn her, and Jessica tells the studio guard that she’s an extra on the set, and then the production people think Jessica is in the movie, too, and they put her in hair and makeup and give her a script to memorize. And Jess freaks out because she is confused by her one line-“Is it satisfactory, sir?”-and then she shoots her scene and Candice is pissed because Jessica looks prettier than her and throws her off the set so Jess can’t warn her about her impending death. She really should just let her get killed now. It will serve her right. I would. But I’d also be really flattered! She thought I was pretty! Yay! Jessica is upset because she feels like she’s blown her best chance to be an actress, like, focus, Jess, and Matt Barron tells her that maybe there will be other chances. She’s helping him solve his fiancee’s death-why doesn’t he just say, “I promise I will get you another chance?” He’s very rude.
This mysterious Gomez tells Matt and Liz to meet him on a bridge somewhere, and they go to meet him, because that’s not weird or shady at all when someone is trying to kill you. Elizabeth tries to send Jessica away, to safety, and she pitches a fit because she thinks Elizabeth is trying to thwart her new burgeoning relationship with grieving Matt Barron. They go to the bridge and whoever Gomez was, he’s dead now. Elizabeth calls 9-1-1, like, hasn’t she learned anything? Does she really think the cops are going to help her? Jessica finds a pen in dead Gomez’s shirt that says, “G.B. Mammoth Pictures.” This Gomez doesn’t sound too bright. I bet he has a gun in his pocket clearly labeled MURDER WEAPON. I bet if he’d lived he would have written a book called, If I Did It, Here’s How I Would Have Done It, all O.J. style.
Liz and Jess and Matt, our Three Musketeers, go off to find out who Gomez was. They search his pockets and find a hotel receipt, and set off. The twins and Matt find out that Gomez, AKA G.B. was Gilbert Bradley, a Mammoth Pictures executive. Jess and Matt depart for his house, and Liz calls Tom to let him know they’ve cracked the case, but what she doesn’t know is that Pierce has bugged Tom’s phone, and when she arranges to meet him at the Coral Reef Mall, he hears all about it. Liz shows up at the mall, and Pierce is waiting for her, posing as a helpful FBI agent. Tom realizes what’s up and he shows up just in the nick of time, and rescues her. Pierce vows revenge.
Jess and Matt visit Gilbert Bradley’s widow and she gives them a key to his safe deposit box, which holds a letter that spells out Bishop’s entire plot. It spells out how they killed Julia, and outlines a plan to kill another actor, Philip Markham, at the Academy Awards-which just happens to be that night! Matt asks Jessica to be his date to the Oscars where they will expose the plot and save Philip’s life. Jessica, with her true sense of perspective, is immediately concerned with what she’ll wear. Apparently the Academy will be honoring Julia with a special award, even though her career really was over before it even began, but Matt is all choked up about the gesture. Aw. They get Elizabeth a job being the girl who escorts the stars off the stage, so she can pull Philip aside if things get hairy, and in true boring Liz fashion, she is not excited at all, though maybe a little excitement would be OK. I mean, there’s a happy medium. Matt gives Jess a dress of Julia’s to wear to the awards, and that’s a little creepy, and if I was his dead fiancée, and there was life after death, I’d be a little pissed. Liz and Tom make a videotape about what they know in case Liz doesn’t make it back from the Oscars, and OK, that would be a little depressing for me, and definitely take the shine out of the moment.
At the awards we learn that Julia’s other two movies are called Surf Colony III and Debutante’s Day Out, and I would actually kind of like to see the last one. Philip Markham wins the Best Supporting Actor award for Undesirable Begins with U, and I am trying to think of a plot that would suit that title. I think it would be a rom-com about a man with really offensive body odor who somehow manages to find love. He accepts his award, and just as Elizabeth is escorting him offstage Pierce, dressed up like a cameraman, stands up to shoot! Liz pushes Philip away and starts wrestling with Pierce. And she gets arrested for assault! NICE JOB COPS. But they also take Pierce in, too. At the station, it looks pretty bad for Liz until Tom shows up with the tape, which I am telling you as a third year law student is total hearsay and not admissible in a court of law, but the cops are totally convinced by it. They let Elizabeth out and she confronts Pierce. And…I guess things are OK now? Because Pierce is behind bars? Even though there’s not really a mention of anything happening to Ronald Bishop, the mastermind of this whole plot? I don’t know. Anyway, the entire campus-nay, the entire town-of Sweet Valley is lauding Elizabeth as “woman of the hour,” and the book ends with Jessica sharing a passionate kiss with a man whose fiancée whom he was deeply in love with died just a few short days ago. And…all’s sort of well that ends pretty much OK.