#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
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.
