Here’s the latest in South River native Janet Evanovich’s numbered mystery series about a charming but clumsy Trenton-based female bounty hunter.
Evanovich, a graduate of Rutgers’s Douglass College in New Brunswick, began her career writing romance novels. In 1994, she turned her pen to mysteries, launching the best-selling Plum series.
In Sizzling Sixteen (St. Martin’s Press), heroine Stephanie Plum tries to track down the culprits who kidnapped her sleazy uncle and bondsman boss, Vinnie. It appears Vinnie is deep in gambling debt to the mobsters who are holding him for ransom.
In typical Evanovich fashion, Stephanie must save the day. With the help of sidekick Lula and office manager Connie, she manages to fight off a crocodile, unleash a stampede of cows, stink bomb a mobster-owned funeral home, and raise over $1 million by holding a guns-and-ammo tag sale, all to rescue Vinnie, whom she promptly loses again. Amid her zany escapades, Stephanie finds time for plenty of sexual tension and a few make-out scenes with Trenton policeman Joe Morelli and a fellow bounty hunter, Ranger, who each come to her rescue more times than she would like to admit.
Although the characters in Evanovich’s fictional New Jersey world seem to be frozen in time—even after sixteen books in the series—Stephanie is still just as inept as a bounty hunter and just as undecided about the love triangle between her, Morelli, and Ranger as she was in the first few novels. Sizzling Sixteen is Evanovich’s trademark, a silly but sweet summertime romp.
Plum fans can check out evanovich.com to see the widely published series’ international book covers, enter a monthly contest, and review lots of related trivia.