The seventh installment in Chris Grabenstein’s mystery series set on the Jersey Shore, Fun House (Pegasus Books) is likely to make the author a lot of new fans. It is so skillfully plotted, its characters so likably drawn, that not having discovered Grabenstein titles sooner is a beach-ball-sized bummer.
The story, like every title in the John Ceepak series, follows the travails of an odd couple of cops: Ceepak, a straight-arrow ex-Marine, and Danny Boyle, a clever, wisecracking 20-something. Fun House tasks them with babysitting the cast members of a Jersey Shore-like reality TV show in the fictional but familiar town of Sea Haven.
Spoofs are shot out in rapid succession, and they land with agility if not subtlety. Chapter one introduces us to the ab-obsessed Paulie Braciole, a.k.a. the Thing, a stand-in for Jersey Shore’s the Situation. There is also Soozy K, “short but top heavy”—Grabenstein’s answer to Snooki. Those two and their eight fellow castmates on the make-believe show known as Fun House carouse their way into a murder mystery.
Each book in the Ceepak series, which began in 2005 with Tilt A Whirl, is named for a boardwalk thrill ride. That those boardwalks are set in New Jersey is regularly made explicit. The presence of Jersey Shore stand-ins aside, Grabenstein knows better than to extend the stereotypes of the real-life reality show. His Jersey Shore is a place hit hard by the economy but not lacking in pleasant, nontacky beachiness. And he comes by his characterization honestly. Though he lives in New York City, Grabenstein spent most of the 1990s in Metuchen, where he wrote TV commercials. One of them, a Dr Pepper ad, was filmed in Seaside Heights.