Review: One for the Money by Janet Evanovich

First line: There are some men who enter a woman’s life and screw it up forever.

From the back cover: Trenton native Stephanie Plum is out of work, out of money, and her car’s in repo-hell. So who does a hardly working girl turn to when the going gets tough? Meet cousin Vinnie, bail bondsman. Stephanie figures it’s nice work if you can get it – shagging bail jumpers for $10,000 a pop. So she joins up. Not that she knows the first thing about it. But hey, beggars can’t be choosers.

Her first assignment: nail Joe Morelli, a former vice cop on the run from a charge of murder one. Stephanie knows Joe from the old neighborhood, and nothing would please her more than nabbing this bozo. But now the bad news – there’s a cranky ex-prize fighter dogging her, unfinished business with Maestro Morelli himself, and a nasty habit she has of leaping first and looking later. If Stephanie doesn’t wise up fast, the first dead body she sees could be her own.

My thoughts: I have finally decided to jump on the Janet Evanovich bandwagon and read the Stephanie Plum series. This first one was a great start to what I hope will continue to be a fun, fast-paced series.

In One for the Money, we meet Stephanie Plum, a down-on-her-luck New Jersey native, that ends up begging her cousin Vinnie for a job. Normally there wouldn’t be any problems in that, except for the fact that Vinnie is a bail bondsman and Stephanie will be acting as a bounty hunter. Of course, she really isn’t very good at being a bounty hunter – she’s afraid to
fire a gun – and that’s where the comedy comes in, but she has courage, determination and plenty of sass and she uses all these to her advantage in this new job.

Throughout the book, we meet some very interesting characters – Stephanie’s parents, her grandmother, and some of the other bounty hunters that work for Vinnie. And of course there are the fugitives that Stephanie must hunt down – the first being, as luck would have it, Joe Morelli, a guy from the neighborhood that Stephanie knows in more ways than one.

I can’t believe I waited so long to read this book – there are now 18 books in this series, plus four in-between stories. Obviously I have a lot of catching up to do! Have you read any of the books in this series? Have you read anything else by Janet Evanovich? What about the movie of this book – has anyone seen it and would you recommend it?

(I received this book from a friend.)

Books in this series: 

     1.  One for the Money                         11.  Eleven on Top
     2.  Two for the Dough                         12.  Twelve Sharp
     3.  Three to Get Deadly                      12.5  Plum Lovin’
     4.  Four to Score                                   13.  Lean Mean Thirteen
     5.  High Five                                           13.5  Plum Lucky
     6.  Hot Six                                                14.  Fearless Fourteen
     7.  Seven Up                                           14.5  Plum Spooky
     8.  Hard Eight                                         15.  Finger Lickin’ Fifteen  

     8.5  Visions of Sugar Plums              16.  Sizzling Sixteen

     9.  To the Nines                                      17.  Smokin’ Seventeen

    10.  Ten Big Ones                                    18.  Explosive Eighteen