Bond girl

>> Stephanie Plum mysteries are
perfect summer reading

by JULIET WATERS
Ah… the perfect summer reading experience. I’m sitting in a café/bar owned by an old Italian couple. She makes the best café au lait in the city and gives refills on milk. As usual, he’s drunk by 11 a.m., but rants in beautiful nicotine-burnt Italian. It’s just me and a couple of students from the nearby massage school. And I’m reading Seven Up, the latest Stephanie Plum paperback from Janet Evanovich.

Yup, the bail-bond enforcer from Trenton, New Jersey, is back on another assignment from her cousin Vinnie. This time, it seems like an easy task, bringing in geriatric mob goon, Eddie de Chooch. Eddie’s 80 years old, has cataracts, is depressed and recently dated Stephanie’s grandmother, who claims “that thing of his was dead as a doorknob. No matter what I did I couldn’t get nothing to happen.”

Problem is Eddie’s insane. That thing of his may be out of commission, but the 9-mil he’s carrying around with him is working just fine. While fleeing Stephanie in a Catholic church, he shoots Christ in the knee. Stephanie’s licensed too, but she hates her .38 and keeps it in the cookie jar. Eddie’s wanted for black-market smuggling, but now there’s also that matter of Loretta Ricci, a “loosey-goosey” from the Trenton senior circuit, whom Stephanie discovered in Eddies’ garage with a bullet in her head.

I could launch into the usual comparisons between Evanovich’s mystery series and The Sopranos, but to be fair, One for the Money came out in 1994, long before the “wise guys on HBO,” as Steph calls them. “Good thing for television because now New Jersey knows how to dress.”

Not that this has changed Steph’s professional uniform of jeans, stretchy T-shirt, four-inch heels and three-inch hair. She, like many of her colleagues, works the bond-enforcement circuit like a slutty real estate agent. When Stephanie bumps into her arch-enemy, enforcer Joyce Barnhardt (who was once caught on the dining room table with Steph’s ex-husband), she discovers Joyce’s new partner is an old high school friend, Janice Molnari. “My kids are all in school now,” Janice explains. “So I thought I’d try working part-time.”
About one in four characters went to high school with Steph. There’s cop Joe Morelli, her sort of fiancé. And there’s also Mooner and Dougie, perpetual stoners whose recent job is fencing stolen merchandise. Sadly, Dougie has disappeared, possibly kidnapped by a mysterious wild-eyed Italian woman. It’s looking like his disappearance might have something to do with Eddie.

Seven Up is, of course, the seventh in the series. Hard Eight has just been released in hardcover, but Evanovich is such classic pulp, I can’t imagine reading her any other way than in neon-coloured trade paperback. Originally a romance novelist, Evanovich claims “it was a rewarding experience, but after 12 romance novels I ran out of sexual positions and decided to move into the mystery genre."

There’s romance—kind of—in Stephanie’s life. Morelli is hot, but he’s always been an off and on thing. It’s hard to believe she would be settling down barely halfway through the series (I’m guessing after a dozen titles, Evanovich will have run out of old high school friends and number puns.) And there’s Ranger, the Cuban American mercenary, who’s been Stephanie’s mentor and sexual tormentor (in a nice way) since the beginning. He’s showing no signs of disappearing, or of taking Stephanie’s engagement seriously.

And wouldn’t you know it, Morelli asks Steph to choose between him and her job. In the real world, that wouldn’t be much of an ultimatum. Why would she choose a shitty job she’s actually not all that good at, where she gets shot at by octogenarians, over a beefcake cop who cleans and cooks (two other things Stephanie’s not all that good at)? Well in the world of trash-mouth mystery, it’s the principle. Not to mention an excuse to change her hair colour. :

Seven Up by Janet Evanovich. St Martin’s paperbacks, pb, 357pp, $9.99