Hard Eight

Starred review from May 20, 2002
The menace is more personal for Trenton's favorite bounty hunter and the energy more manic in this latest outing than in last year's Seven Up. As a favor to her mother's next-door neighbor, Mabel Markowitz, Stephanie agrees to check up on the lady's granddaughter, Evelyn Soder, who has suddenly taken off with her little girl, Annie, leaving behind a child custody bond against Mabel's house. The son-in-law is a bad guy who lost his bar to Eddie Abruzzi, a very nasty character who owns Evelyn's building. Soon someone in a bunny suit is trailing Stephanie, her car is blown up, her apartment infiltrated and a dead body appears on her couch. She calls in her associate, Ranger, the gorgeous and mysterious Cuban bond agent, while her sometime boyfriend, Morelli the cop, also gets on the case—a real doozy for which she's not getting paid. On the home front, ever-raunchy Grandma Mazur is eager to assist. Sister Valerie and kids have moved back in as well, so there's nowhere but the couch for Stephanie and one bathroom for all. Valerie is inexplicably attracted to Evelyn's goofy lawyer, who's been tagging along with Stephanie and the ever-outrageous file clerk and ex-hooker Lula, further complicating this twisted case. Life in the Burg takes on a sinister turn with serious results. Evanovich does it again, delivering an even more suspenseful and more outrageous turn with the unstoppable Stephanie, heroine of all those who have to live on peanut butter until the next check comes through. Waiting for nine will be tough. Agent, Robert Gottlieb. (One-day laydown June 18)Forecast:
Seven Up landed on most bestseller lists at #1 first week out, not only because of the author's popularity but also because of clever positioning of on-sale date by St. Martin's. Whether or not the house can repeat the trick, expect huge sales for this title.

February 15, 2002
Evanovich has certainly come a long way since One for the Money; her latest Stephanie Plum mystery merits a one-day national laydown on June 18. Here, Plum looks for a missing child while trying to keep her love life from getting out of hand.

Copyright 2001 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 1, 2002
Stephanie Plum lives not far from her parents in a Trenton, New Jersey, neighborhood called the Burg. Things haven't changed much there since the '50s, despite cell phones and computers and the fact that Stephanie works as a bounty hunter. Stephanie still eats her mom's macaroni and cheese for comfort, and Mom'sis where her sister Valerie went when her marriage blew up. It's a little darker for our heroine now. She's kind of broken up with Morelli, the gorgeous cop; she's still wary of Ranger, her guide in bounty hunting, who is composed of equal parts magic and darkness; and an eerie, scary bad guy named Abruzzi is putting snakes in her apartment and spiders in her car, when his minions aren't blowing it up. Steph is trying to find the missing daughter and granddaughter of her mom's next-door neighbor, and Abruzzi doesn't like that. The things Evanovich does so well--family angst, sweet eroticism, stealth shopping, that stunning mix of terror and hilarity--are done better than ever here. This one not only allows Steph some inchoate but graceful complexity but also gives splendid cameos to both her mom and Valerie (the moving automobile as weapon has rarely been employed more outrageously--twice). And Grandma Mazur in the doughnut shop parking lot--well, you won't believe it.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2002, American Library Association.)