By Michelle Palmer
Stephanie Plum is back in this newest installment of Janet Evanovich’s best-selling series, with more hijinks, buckets of chicken and romance to spare.
Loveable Stephanie Plum is a magnet for disaster. Her job as a local bonds enforcement agent for her cousin Vinnie has its risks, but Stephanie is particularly attracted to trouble, even when she is away from her hometown of Trenton, NJ. This time around, trouble finds Stephanie on a trip back from Hawaii, when her seatmate gets off the plane at a layover and never comes back. The seatmate is dead, and has left Stephanie with a mysterious photograph. Things go from bad to worse back at home, when everyone from the FBI to a hired hit man known as Razzle Dazzle wants to get their hands on that photo. Add to that the love triangle between Stephanie, sometimes-boyfriend Morelli and “bad boy” Ranger, and you have a very fun read.
There are plenty of things in Explosive Eighteen to keep readers happy—cars and RVs torched, Stephanie’s sidekick Lula and her desperate need for Cluck-in-a-Bucket chicken, gun-toting Grandma Mazur, and that classic Evanovich wit. While some of Evanovich’s recent Plum novels have seemed a little flat, Explosive Eighteen shows us that the series still has some stories to tell. The mysteries surrounding the photograph—who was in the picture, and why do so many people want it?—is more sophisticated and intriguing than the plots of Evanovich’s earlier novels. Stephanie herself seems to have grown up as well; she seems more capable and less dependent on the men in her life to come to her rescue.
A Stephanie Plum novel would be nothing without romantic struggles, and this book is no exception. The book begins with Stephanie on her way home from a trip to Hawaii involving both Morelli and Ranger—and it hasn’t gone well. To reveal any more details would be to spoil some of the fun, but by the end of the book, Stephanie has sworn off men forever (or at least, until the next book).
If you have never read the Stephanie Plum novels, now is the time to start. The first in the series, One for the Money, was published nearly two decades ago, and since then Evanovich’s books have had wild commercial success. A movie version of the first book, starring Katherine Heigl, has just opened in theaters this month, and is sure to generate a whole new group of fans. It’s easy to fall in love with Stephanie and her cast of characters; after 18 years and as many novels, they begin to feel like family members. That is the true pleasure of reading a book like Explosive Eighteen—a light easy read that’s like an afternoon with family—but one you can leave behind when you close the book.
Michelle Palmer is a RTS One Book Committee member, and author of the book blog, Turn of the Page, michellepalmersbooks.blogspot.com.
