Plum Spooky: A In-between-numbers novel
by: Janet Evanovich
Published by: St. Martin's Press
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Reviewed by Harold N. Walters
Stephanie Plum has returned in Plum Spooky, a Between-the-Numbers book for Janet Evanovich’s intrepid—albeit foolhardy—bounty hunter heroine from Trenton, New Jersey. Self-deprecating as always, Stephanie admits that she often feels like “a bran muffin in a bakery case filled with éclairs” and that her favorite word is cake.
Stephanie recognizes the beginning of a bad day when she opens her door to find a monkey on her doorstep. Carl is a simian monkey with species confusion that perhaps understands every word Stephanie says. Stephanie and sidekick Lula, a former ”˜ho (whore) able to “perform the miracle of squeezing her plus-size body into petite-size clothes” are hunting down Martin Munch for Stephanie’s employer, bail-bondsman Uncle Vinnie. Munch is, perhaps—Stephanie’s life seems to be plagued with perhaps—a mad scientist who, along with a vampire-like villain named Wulf, wants to create a Wicked Weather Machine and take control of the world.
Although ubiquitous Mystery Man Ranger is watching Stephanie’s back, and her lover, New Jersey cop Joe Morelli is busy baby-sitting his philandering brother, Stephanie finds herself in the protective embrace of Diesel.
Diesel is, perhaps, a paranormal bounty hunter specifically on the trail of Gerwulf Grimoire—Wulf—but since Wulf is in cahoots with Martin Munch, or, perhaps, vice versa, Diesel joins Stephanie’s manhunt.
Munch has fled the research lab that employs him with “a one-of-a-kind monster cesium vapor magnetometer” a device that is vital to Munch’s and Wulf’s villainy. Together, after kidnapping an animal rights activist, the iniquitous pair has absconded to the wilderness of New Jersey’s Pine Barrens.
The Pine Barrens are populated by Unmentionables, people perhaps not quite human: a family of Sasquatches; the Easter Bunny; the Jersey Devil; and the fabulous Fire Farter, an Unmentionable eventually invited to dinner by Stephanie’s grandma Mazur.
You will turn pages pell-mell to keep pace with Stephanie to find out if she saves the world, to find out if Carl, savior of a troop of caged monkeys in the Barrens, really understands English. Readers will be tickled to death, perhaps.
Plum Spooky is more fun than a barrel of monkeys.
Armchair Interviews says: More ripe Evanovich for hungry readers.
Author’s Web site: http://www.Evanovich.com
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