By Judy T.
I didn’t find One for the Money in a bookstore.
I met Janet Evanovich.
My best gal pal invited me along to a book signing and meet-the-author event. Janet was already somewhere around the fifteenth Stephanie Plum book at the time, and I knew basically nothing about any of them.
I did, however, have an assumption.
Romance novels.
Nope.
I have never been a romance-type reader. I don’t have the time or patience for that sort of thing, and I never did.
Okay, fine.
EVERYONE READ SWEET VALLEY HIGH.
Moving on.
Janet Evanovich walked into that event with fiery red hair and an attitude to match, and she was an absolute riot. She was entertaining, funny, full of life, and completely unlike whatever preconceived notion I had apparently constructed about her.
It was also my first author event, so she set the bar rather unfairly high.
Afterward, I even ended up talking with her daughter about website design and keeping up with her mother’s work. The whole experience was just fun.
And somewhere in there, they discovered that I wasn’t particularly interested in romance novels.
Rather than writing me off as a lost cause, they steered me toward Stephanie Plum and gave me the first book in the series:
One for the Money.
I had absolutely no idea what a can of worms they had just opened.
Meet Stephanie Plum. I Guess.
I’ll admit it: Stephanie wasn’t exactly what I had in mind for a protagonist at first.
We’re introduced to this woman who has lost her job buying lingerie and needs money. Desperately. She eventually blackmails her cousin into giving her a job as a bounty hunter despite possessing roughly none of the qualifications one might associate with being a bounty hunter.
Okay.
Where exactly are we going with this, Janet?
Then I met everyone else.
Oh.
OH.
This wasn’t the book I thought I was reading at all.
Stephanie’s entire orbit is populated by people who somehow make her already ridiculous circumstances even more ridiculous.
And then there’s Grandma Mazur.
Grandma Mazur Takes the Cake
If you make me pick a favorite character from the Stephanie Plum universe, Grandma Mazur wins.
It’s not even particularly close.
Her antics made me genuinely laugh out loud. Not “that was amusing” book laughter. Actual sitting-there-by-yourself laughing.
As the series continued, I got the impression Evanovich figured out fairly quickly that readers loved Grandma Mazur and began leaning into her wonderfully bizarre nature. I wouldn’t say she overplayed it—at least not through the books I’ve read. I haven’t kept up with roughly the last decade of the series, so I’m not going to pretend I know what happened after I stopped.
But Grandma Mazur?
More Grandma Mazur was perfectly fine with me.
Then there’s Lula, who brings her own special brand of chaos. Joe Morelli brings history. Ranger brings…well, Ranger.
I liked Ranger enough that I eventually named a cat after him.
So there’s that.
Sorry, Joe. You Had Your Chance.
The Joe/Stephanie/Ranger tension became another part of the fun for me.
Joe is the guy from Stephanie’s past. Ranger is the mysterious bad boy entering her future.
And as a gal who was bullied in school, I had a pretty immediate reaction to Joe Morelli:
Make Joe sweat it out. He had his chance.
There is something deeply satisfying about someone from your past suddenly realizing your value when you’re no longer waiting around for them to notice it.
So no, Joe. You don’t automatically get Stephanie.
You can wait.
Preferably while Ranger is standing nearby looking mysterious.
The thing is, though, I still wouldn’t call these romance novels. At least that isn’t why I read them.
The romantic tension is seasoning.
The meal is Stephanie stumbling through bounty hunting, her insane family, the cases, the cars, the bad decisions and this increasingly ridiculous collection of people surrounding her.
Stephanie Grew on Me
The more I read, the more I realized I could actually relate to Stephanie.
Not because our lives were particularly similar.
In fact, sometimes it was the opposite.
I grew up learning some of those practical daddy’s-girl things. I knew things about cars and other stuff Stephanie seemed completely bewildered by.
There were definitely moments of:
Girl. Seriously?
But underneath that, I understood her.
Stephanie doesn’t walk into bounty hunting magically knowing what she’s doing. She’s not suddenly transformed into some flawless badass because the plot requires one.
She screws up.
She improvises.
Things go spectacularly wrong.
And then she gets up and tries something else.
There’s something wonderfully human about that.
Then I Realized I Was Smiling
This may be the biggest compliment I can give One for the Money.
I found myself smiling more than I had realized possible from reading a book.
Evanovich doesn’t merely write jokes. She creates situations and characters that are genuinely fun to spend time with.
I finished the first book.
Then I wanted the second.
And the next one.
And the next one.
I kept buying and reading Stephanie Plum books until eventually I simply couldn’t afford to keep up anymore.
I still have most of them.
They’re sitting in a storage box because I don’t have room to put them out, but they’re still mine.
All because I went with a friend to meet an author whose books I was pretty sure weren’t for me.
And There Was Janet
Something else happened when I started reading One for the Money.
I recognized Janet Evanovich immediately.
The woman I’d just met—the attitude, humor, irreverence, energy—was right there in her writing.
What you see is what you get.
I respect the hell out of that.
Janet herself convinced me to give a kind of book I’d already dismissed a chance. Then her writing proved that I’d had the whole thing wrong.
She didn’t turn me into a romance reader.
She turned me into a Stephanie Plum reader.
There’s a difference.
A rather expensive difference, as it turned out.
The NAJ Rating
THE ACCIDENTAL NINE-CAN SIX-PACK
Yes.
Nine cans.
A six-pack contains six cans. I am aware.
While creating the NAJ Rating System, we once accidentally made a Six-Pack graphic containing nine cans.
We fixed it.
But I’m bringing the mistake back for One for the Money.
Because Janet Evanovich and her daughter handed me one innocent little book that day, and I had absolutely no idea what a can of worms I was opening.
One book became another. And another. And another.
I kept them.
I named a cat Ranger.
And all these years later, Stephanie Plum and Grandma Mazur can still make me smile just thinking about them.
Six cans aren’t enough.
So congratulations, One for the Money.
You get the accidental nine-can Six-Pack.
The NAJ Rating System does not technically permit this.
Nobody Asked Judy to count, either.