Top Secret Twenty-One: A Stephanie Plum Novel (Stephanie Plum, #21)

by Janet Evanovich

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Catch a professional assassin: top priority. Find a failure-to-appear and collect big bucks: top score. How she’ll pull it all off: top secret.
 
Trenton, New Jersey’s favorite used-car dealer, Jimmy Poletti, was caught selling a lot more than used cars out of his dealerships. Now he’s out on bail and has missed his date in court, and bounty hunter Stephanie Plum is looking to bring him in. Leads are quickly turning into dead ends, and all too frequently into dead bodies. Even Joe Morelli, the city’s hottest cop, is struggling to find a clue to the suspected killer’s whereabouts. These are desperate times, and they call for desperate measures. So Stephanie is going to have to do something she really doesn’t want to do: protect former hospital security guard and general pain in her behind Randy Briggs. Briggs was picking up quick cash as Poletti’s bookkeeper and knows all his boss’s dirty secrets. Now Briggs is next on Poletti’s list of people to put six feet under.
 
To top things off, Ranger—resident security expert and Stephanie’s greatest temptation—has been the target of an assassination plot. He’s dodged the bullet this time, but if Ranger wants to survive the next attempt on his life, he’ll have to enlist Stephanie’s help and reveal a bit more of his mysterious past.
 
Death threats, highly trained assassins, highly untrained assassins, and Stark Street being overrun by a pack of feral Chihuahuas are all in a day’s work for Stephanie Plum. The real challenge is dealing with her Grandma Mazur’s wild bucket list. A boob job and getting revenge on Joe Morelli’s Grandma Bella can barely hold a candle to what’s number one on the list—but that’s top secret.

Praise for Top Secret Twenty-One
 
“The combination of biting dialogue, outrageous characters and intense story lines are consistent throughout. And [Janet Evanovich] novels are the true definition of a guilty pleasure.”—Associated Press
 
“Evanovich doesn’t disappoint. . . . [She] weaves setting, family, romance and crime to pull the plot of Top Secret Twenty-One forward.”—Bookreporter

• ISBN10: 0345542924
• ISBN13: 9780345542922
• Publish Date: 17 June 2014 (first published 1 January 2014)
• Publish Status: Out of Stock
• Publish Country: US
• Publisher: Random House USA Inc
• Imprint: Bantam Dell Publishing Group, Div of Random House, Inc
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 352
• Language: English

Reviews

[Shreela]

Extra star for the pups.

[Pigpen.Reads]

This book is my favorite out the Stephanie Plum series.
As always, it gives me a good laugh. Lula and Briggs together was hysterical.
I was laughing way too loud and got weird looks from my kids. :P
I'm definitely rooting for Ranger.

[Liz (Bent Bookworm)]

At one point I was laughing so hard I was crying. Definitely the best of the Plum novels I've read during my recent binge of them. Hopefully #22 will come up to the same standard. These are all pretty much the same by now, but I keep reading them basically for the comfort of it. You come into it knowing you're going to have a whole lot of Lula falling out of her clothes, Stephanie causing (or being the target of) large quantities of mahem, and Morelli and Ranger vying for Stephanie's bed (and heart?). Same old same old...it's good because it's comforting in the sameness of it. I really would like to see some kind of movement on the relationship lines though...but I guess that might mean the end of the series as we know it.

3.5/5 Rating

This was better than the last few stories, it felt like a classic Stephanie plum novel. I laughed and enjoyed the book overall. All the characters are great.

Only thing I wish is for the author to shake things up a bit. She has 21 novels and it's still the same. Stephanie is still in the same place, she should do something to incorporate something new for her. Either advance her character to be something more, several people in the novels have advanced, Ranger used to be a bounty hunter, now he runs his own operation, Morelli has matured and is living in his own house with a dog.

Another thing the author could move forward is finally making a decision on Morelli or Ranger, they are in the same place, regarding the love triangle, and have been for a long while.

So far the humor of the books and characters have kept me around but I think if she doesn't shake things up a bit that it might stagnant her novels, at least for me. I have stopped reading other book series for that same thing.

[Baroness Book Trove]

CAUTION! IF YOU HAVE NOT READ THIS BOOK YET. CONTINUE AT YOUR OWN RISK! THIS REVIEW MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS!!!


I know that this book is the newest Stephanie Plum book and I don't really want to write a review for all nineteen of the others. I wrote a review for the Takedown Twenty but other than that I haven't wrote any for the other at all. I love this series as it is a good one and everything about it is pretty good.

This one is even more better than nineteen and all other books before. Grated Briggs's is an annoying little midget that whenever he is in a book I always feel sorry for Stephanie since she always get stuck with him.


I love this one a lot because one of the FTA's (failed to appear) thinks he is Gru and that all of the Chihuahua's that he owns are his minions. Everything about this book is excellent including Grandma Mazur and Grandma Bella's little scrabble's about who did what. I highly recommend this book for anyone that needs a good laugh. I give it a five star rating.

To read my other reviews please go to my blog: http://baronessbooktrove.blogspot.com/