Book Review-Older Books 20

Review—Ten Big Ones

Ten Big Ones by Janet Evanovich.  Published by St. Martin’s Press in June, 2004, 312 pages.

Trenton, New Jersey, a place where crime is growing and its violence is escalating.  The Burg is a piece of this city and it’s a place where people still know each other’s business, sometimes down to the smallest detail.

This is where Stephanie Plum lives and she provides many backyard stories for this neighborhood.  She works as a big, bad bounty hunter; though it frequently seems like a scene from Laurel and Hardy.  She is a work in progress in regards to her career as a bounty hunter.  Stephanie hates guns and is frequently missing her handcuffs and her pepper spray occasionally malfunctions.  She does have interesting help in the form of the bond office’s file clerk Lula, an ex-street working girl; and her grandmother will come along for the ride to help out and usually swing by the local funeral parlor for the latest viewing.  Stephanie’s love-life isn’t much better.  She’s on-again/off-again in a relationship with a Trenton detective Joe Morelli; and she has an in-lust/just friend’s relationship with her mentor Ranger, a truly big and bad bounty hunter.

This time Stephanie may be in real trouble.  While bringing in a fugitive, she sees the face of a local criminal who is known as the Red Devil, and the bomb he had planned to use on a store lands under her car.  And, yet another car has been totaled for Stephanie.  The Red Devil turns out to be a gang member and soon after a contract is put on her head and her job just gets more and more difficult.

Stephanie is often bumbling but just as often ingenious in her determination to stick with this job.  She constantly faces opposition from her mother and boyfriend for her choice of profession, but somehow through luck and stubbornness she just manages to get through in one piece.  And while doing so she still manages to make it to dinner every Saturday with her family and be involved in her sister’s wedding plans.

Janet Evanovich has written many other novels and this is the tenth in this series.  Stephanie may be the comic relief to some of her co-workers, but she is definitely a comic relief to readers.  If you haven’t tried this series, it is definitely recommended.  Every one of these books makes me laugh and I finished this one in under two days.