Tricky Twenty-Two

Tricky Twenty Two is the twenty second Stephanie Plum novel from Janet Evanovich, published in 2015. By this point in the series, regular readers know exactly what they are getting. Stephanie, the bumbling but tenacious bounty hunter from Trenton, New Jersey, will lose at least one car to fire, smash, or explosion. She will eat too many doughnuts. She will be torn between her on again off again cop boyfriend Joe Morelli and the dangerous, mysterious Ranger. Her grandmother Mazur will start a brawl at a viewing at the Stiva funeral home. And the bond skip she is supposed to bring in will turn out to be tangled up in something much weirder than a missed court date.

In this book the case starts with a failed FTA who happens to be a fraternity boy at Kiltman College, a small school where someone has just murdered a popular professor. As Stephanie pokes around campus, she gets pulled into a fraternity hazing situation and a stranger plot involving genetic experimentation and several characters who are not at all who they pretend to be. The plot is, as always, secondary to the comic set pieces. Lula’s wardrobe choices. Grandma Mazur’s attempts to find a fresh husband. The escalating destruction of Stephanie’s apartment, car, and personal dignity.

Evanovich has been doing this for a long time and the formula is the formula. Some readers love the series for exactly the comfort food predictability of it. Others have been waiting since the early 2000s for Stephanie to actually choose between Morelli and Ranger and have been disappointed every year since. Tricky Twenty Two does not resolve that triangle. It does deliver the laughs, the chaos, and the brisk pacing that Plum fans show up for.

For longtime fans, it is more of what they came for. New readers should start with One for the Money to get the full effect.