Hot Six

Starred review from July 17, 2000
Sexy, smart-talking New Jersey bounty hunter Stephanie Plum returns for her sixth wildly amusing mystery (after 1999's High Five). Determination and contacts (she's grown up with half the cops and crooks in Trenton) compensate for Steph's poor aim with a gun, bad luck with cars and soft-hearted approach to her job (one bail jumper evades her four times). The police are after her mentor, the mysterious Ranger, wanted for killing drug and gun dealer Homer Ramos. Claiming he's innocent, Ranger persuades Steph to help him keep an eye on the Ramos clan. Steph teams up with her lover, vice cop Joe Morelli, then strikes out on her own when she realizes neither Joe nor Ranger will share information with her. When Mafia thugs get involved, she barely avoids kidnapping and torture. Meanwhile, there's her love life to deal with. Can she be physically attracted to Ranger and be in love with Joe? Evanovich spins all these threads, plus more, into a lunatic tapestry of nonstop action peopled by wacky characters straight out of a 1930s screwball comedy: Steph's Grandma Mazur, 80 years old, with the world view of a teenage punk; Mooner and Dougie, two lovable but zonked-out stolen goods dealers who have a closeout sale before going to jail; Habib and Mitchell, mobsters who follow Steph when Mitchell's wife doesn't need the car for kids' soccer games; and Steph's co-worker and pal, Lula, a gun-toting ex-prostitute always ready for an adventure. Evanovich just keeps getting better.

May 1, 2000
In her sixth hilarious adventure (following High Five), Stephanie Plum, Jersey Girl and bounty hunter extraordinaire, is on the hunt for Ranger, her mysterious and sexy co-worker, who has been implicated in a murder. At the same time, she is tracked by thugs Habib and Mitchell, who threaten bodily harm if she doesn't find Ranger for them. Warns Habib, "We will spread your entrails across an entire parking space of my cousin Muhammad's 7-Eleven parking lot." If that isn't stressful enough, Stephanie must cope with the destruction of several cars (her Honda Civic is torched accidentally, and an irate bail jumper rams her borrowed Rollswagen, an ancient VW Bug with the hood of a Rolls Royce). Worst of all, Stephanie's eccentric Grandma Mazur decides to move in with her, putting a definite crimp in her affair with vice cop Joe Morelli. While the mystery is not particularly interesting, Evanovich's wisecracking, feisty heroine and the bizarre characters she meets will leave readers wanting more. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 3/15/00.]--Wilda Williams, "Library Journal"

Copyright 2000 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from May 1, 2000
If you were angry with Evanovich at the end of "High Five," when she coyly didn't tell us which of Stephanie Plum's two studmuffins the Jersey Girl^-bounty hunter was planning to visit, you'll soon forgive her. It turns out that Stephanie's amour of choice, Latino bounty hunter Ranger, has gone missing, a suspect in a murder himself. Meanwhile, Stephanie's relationship with Joe Morelli, Trenton cop extraordinaire, is definitely compromised when her Grandma Mazur moves in with her. (To say nothing of the dog, whose name is Bob.) There's gangsters and gunrunners and all that, but what keeps Evanovich readers screaming for more are her sizzling erotic moments (a jacket dropping to the floor can raise the temperature several degrees) and her gift of making the grittiest and most terrifying of situations hilarious. Stephanie talks a friend down from a bridge, invades a Star Trek marathon, loses the requisite number of cars by misadventure, and--a personal favorite--captures a wife-killer out on bail while he's naked and soapy in the shower. And at the end, when Morelli's mother and grandmother halt 300 pages of foreplay interruptus by appearing at his door and asking where the ring is, even Stephanie finds herself looking at her hand in disbelief. Wow! Can't wait for the next one. ((Reviewed May 1, 2000))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2000, American Library Association.)