High Five by
Janet Evanovich
hbk out September 99
Published by Macmillan
at £14.99
Stephanie Plum is the world's unluckiest bounty hunter. But even a catastrophe on legs like Stephanie can make a living as long as the bad guys keep jumping bail. The trouble starts when everybody suddenly takes a turn for the law-abiding and the rent's due.
Enter Ranger, a sort of Darth Vader with sex appeal who runs an assortment of businesses with a tenuous relationship to the law. In exchange for a new black Porsche and the going rate for the job, he offers Stephanie the chance to do some moonlighting for him.
He should have known better. Within days, she's blown up a building, wrecked the car and demolished a garbage truck, all in the line of duty. As if that's not enough, queen of the big hair Stephanie has to contend with a family so eccentric they make the Addams Family look like US clones of the Oxo family. When her Uncle Fred disappears -- abducted by aliens, according to Grandma Mazur -- Stephanie finds herself at the heart of the strangest missing person case New Jersey has ever seen.
Oh, and there's a midget bail jumper living in her apartment. Well, he needs a secure address now that Stephanie's destroyed his front door. And it's handy having a man about the place when the serial rapist comes calling. Even if the man in question is only three feet tall.
And then there's hunky cop Joe Morelli, the on-off love of her life, who seems to be acting rather strangely around his former High School
sweetheart, behaviour that gives Stephanie the perfect excuse to let her hormones run riot around Ranger. As if she needed one.
All of this hectic mayhem is related with a breathless brio that is Janet Evanovich's trademark. She moves seamlessly from one comic set piece to the next, throwing away witty one-liners as if she had an endless supply filed away somewhere.
And along the way, she weaves a clever scam that teases right to the end. There are few crime writers who can make their readers laugh out loud at
the same time as keeping the tension as high octane as this.
If there is a fault with Janet Evanovich's novels, it's that they lack substance. As they say about Chinese food, an hour after you've finished, you want another one. But for sheer uncomplicated fun, Stephanie Plum is hard to beat.
(
Val McDermid
- Gold Dagger winner & creator of Lindsay Gordon, Kate Brannigan & Tony Hill)
High Five by
Janet Evanovich