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Stephanie Plum has big hair. This is unusual for a bounty hunter. Even more unusual is her failure to recharge her taser or keep bullets in her gun, a foible that results in multiple thefts of her car. Whilst hamster ownership is certainly not crucial for success as a bail enforcement agent, it's in the area of relationships – both animal and human – that Stephanie excels. After all, being romantically entangled with two men at once has got to be a good thing, hasn't it? It turns out, at the start of the eighteenth novel in the Stephanie Plum series that such complications, when combined with a tropical island, can lead to trouble. Forced to flee a trip to Hawaii early, Stephanie ends up in more hot water when the man she sits next to on the return flight disappears after a stopover. Not long afterwards, an unpleasant collection of shady characters begins to demand that Stephanie hands over an item they're convinced she now owns. None of them has any manners, not even the FBI, and an uncooperative court-dodger does nothing to ease the situation. EXPLOSIVE EIGHTEEN contains some classic Plum set-pieces – vehicles going up in flames, a viewing at the undertakers, Sunday lunch with Stephanie's parents in New Jersey, eccentricities from Grandma Mazur – but at times the plot can feel disjointed, with almost too much action to create a cohesive whole. Tagging both Stephanie's car and Plum herself with tracking devices starts to seem like a get-out-of-jail-free card that's been used once too often. Despite the international gangsters hot on Plum's heels, the threat level never really hits the red zone. Perhaps this is because of Plum's frequent calls for back-up from ex-colleague Ranger's private security firm; these seem more of a cop-out than when Ranger helps her out as a one-man band, as in earlier books. Or maybe it's hard to feel that the heroine of such a long-running series will ever come to serious harm. After an impressive 23 books starring the same character (there are 18 in the regular Stephanie Plum series and an extra 5 "between the numbers" novels) it must be more and more challenging to come up with fresh adventures and relationship developments. There are signs that Stephanie has new rivals: in 2010 Janet Evanovich began the "Wicked" series centred on Diesel, a character from the "between the numbers" Plum books, and cupcake-baker Lizzy Tucker. So maybe Stephanie is under serious threat after all. If you're a die-hard Stephanie fan you'll be quite content with EXPLOSIVE EIGHTEEN. But if you're new to the series, you'd be best off, and not just for reasons of chronology, starting with ONE FOR THE MONEY instead. It's also just out as a film. §Lisa Kahlua is a writer based in Bristol. She enjoys reading a wide range of fiction, as long as it's not too gruesome.
Reviewed by Lisa Kahlua, March 2012
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