Explosive Eighteen

Stephanie Plum's Hawaiian getaway has gone so wrong that she is flying home to Newark alone, and the trouble starts before the plane even lands. The man who sat next to her on Flight 127 never got back on after the layover in Los Angeles. He turns up dead, stuffed in a trash can and waiting for the garbage truck. Whoever killed him was after something specific: a photograph he was supposed to be carrying.

A crowd of thugs, lunatics and federal agents is now hunting for that picture, and Stephanie is the only other person who has seen it. That makes her the one loose end everyone wants to tie up. She sits down with an FBI sketch artist to recreate the face in the photo, but her descriptions produce a Tom Cruise lookalike the first time and an Ashton Kutcher lookalike the second. Until she gets better at describing what she saw, she had better keep looking over her shoulder.

Back at the bail bonds office, nothing is calmer. Vinnie's temporary headquarters, a converted bonds bus, goes up in flames. Lula, Stephanie's driver and sidekick, falls head over heels for the biggest skip the team has ever chased. Joyce Barnhardt, Stephanie's lifelong rival, moves into her apartment. Meanwhile, everyone keeps asking what really happened in Hawaii.

They won't get answers from the men in her life. Morelli, the Trenton cop, stays silent on the subject, and so does the mysterious Ranger. Stephanie's own explanation is that it's complicated. This is the eighteenth novel in Evanovich's Stephanie Plum series, a comic crime caper full of fast banter, bad luck and New Jersey chaos.