Sizzling Sixteen by Janet Evanovich

You find yourself in Trenton, New Jersey. (Don’t ask why.) Your cast of characters includes the following:

  • Stephanie Plum, an incompetent, thirty-something bounty hunter (“bond enforcement agent”) of mixed Hungarian and Italian ancestry;
  • Morelli, a handsome homicide detective whose long-standing lust for Stephanie has yielded an on-again, off-again relationship that has never progressed to marriage and doubtless never will;
  • Ranger, an equally handsome, Hispanic former Army Ranger who owns a corporate security company and lusts after Stephanie with equal fervor; Ranger repeatedly loans Stephanie expensive vehicles, which she invariably destroys, only to be saved by him from death and disaster;
  • Lula (not the Brazilian president), a pistol-packing former ‘ho with a taste for doughnuts, fried chicken, and lurid clothing, who now works as a “file clerk” in the bail bond office where Stephanie receives her assignments;
  • Cousin Vinnie, a sex pervert with a truly catholic range of tastes for animals, women’s underwear, and almost anything else of or pertaining to the female gender;
  • Connie, the gutsy bail bond office manager whose family is part of a larger Family;
  • Grandma Mazur, Stephanie’s constantly randy grandmother whose avocation is attending funeral home “showings;”
  • Mooner, a high school classmate of Stephanie’s who is, of course, continuously stoned and thus appears to live on another planet;
  • Joyce Barnhardt, Stephanie’s nemesis since high school, whose exaggerated surgical makeover has captivated not only Stephanie’s then-husband but Morelli as well; and
  • several more or less normal-seeming people to round out the cast.

This is what you’ll find in Sizzling Sixteen. Got it? OK. Now, as the playwright of this farce, it’s your job to mix and match these characters, swirl them around a main plot (of sorts) with a couple of cute sub-plots thrown in. But let’s assume you’ve already done all this. What do you get?

Sizzling Sixteen (Stephanie Plum #16) by Janet Evanovich ★★★★★

You get Sizzling Sixteen — the (count ’em) sixteenth Stephanie Plum novel. Now, if you prefer to read rather than write this sort of thing, you might want to pick it up. Janet Evanovich’s writing is often hilarious, assuming you go in for broad humor (as I do). Just don’t expect to (a) learn anything new, (b) be uplifted or enlightened; or (c) feel good about why you keep reading this stuff!

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