Ah, vintage Stephanie Plum. Is there anything better at taking your mind off of the world than spending a couple hours with Stephanie, her on-again (in this book, at least) boyfriend Morelli, the sexy, Rock-like Ranger and Lula, the former prostitute? The only thing missing in the thirteenth installment of this wildly popular series is a tirade against dieting and in favor of partially hydrogenated fats.

For those of you who are not initiated into the world of Stephanie Plum, here goes: Stephanie a bubbly, attractive and not very good bounty hunter in Trenton, New Jersey. She has two romantic interests, the good cop, Joe Morelli, a strikingly handsome Italian stallion, and the bad guy, Ranger, a dark, mysterious and quiet man who is the literary embodiment of the man you don’t want to meet in a dark alley. Then there’s Lula, the porcine prostitute, and Stephanie’s funeral-crashing grandmother.

This time around, Stephanie starts the book by attacking her ex-husband (and grade-A jerk) Dickie Orr in the middle of his office. The next day, Dickie has disappeared, leaving only a trail of blood spots in his home. Stephanie wakes up to find that she is the prime suspect in his disappearance and, in typical Plum exuberance, she ignores her imminent jailing and focuses instead on capturing a few FTAs (which is bounty-hunter parlance for people who skipped out on bail). Evanovich gives us a few new fun characters – a bomb-building taxidermist – while resurrecting old ones – the grave digger Simon Diggery.
Of course, she cannot keep her mind off of going to jail forever, so she starts to investigate Dickie’s disappearance on her own. In doing so, she unveils a massive, world-wide scandal (yes, housed in Trenton, the same city with the bridge that says, Trenton Makes, the World Takes) and a massive number of dead bodies. Will she discover what happened to Dickie in time? Or will she be next? Come on, it’s an Evanovich novel. Stephanie never keeps us on the edge of our seats, and while there’s always a few interesting twists, you cannot expect a thriller here. What you can expect is a lot of laughs and a fantastic read for that last beach day of summer.

Longtime readers of the series might be disappointed that there is no movement in this book on Stephanie’s romantic life, and as a Plum novel, it is pretty short on the monkey sex that one would normally expect. More seriously, Lulu has a diminished role in this book, and the sexual tension between Stephanie and Ranger is decidedly muted this time around. Could this signal maturity for Stephanie? Or is this just Evanovich’s way of letting the audience breathe before she announces a shocker in the next one?
What do you think? Does Janet Evanovich still have the magic with Stephanie Plum, or is it time to concentrate on a new series?