Dirty Thirty (Stephanie Plum #30)Janet EvanovichAtria2023, 336pCopy borrowed from a family member

Blurb {from the publisher/Goodreads.com}: Stephanie Plum, Trenton’s hardest working, most underappreciated bounty hunter, is offered a freelance assignment that seems simple enough. Local jeweler Martin Rabner wants her to locate his former security guard, Andy Manley (a.k.a. Nutsy), who he is convinced stole a fortune in diamonds out of his safe. Stephanie is also looking for another troubled man, Duncan Dugan, a fugitive from justice arrested for robbing the same jewelry store on the same day.

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With her boyfriend Morelli away in Miami on police business, Stephanie is taking care of Bob, Morelli’s giant orange dog who will devour anything, from Stephanie’s stray donuts to the upholstery in her car. Morelli’s absence also means the inscrutable, irresistible security expert Ranger is front and center in Stephanie’s life when things inevitably go sideways. And he seems determined to stay there.

To complicate matters, her best friend Lula is convinced she is being stalked by a mythological demon hell-bent on relieving her of her wardrobe. An overnight stakeout with Stephanie’s mother and Grandma Mazur reveals three generations of women with nerves of steel and driving skills worthy of NASCAR champions.

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As the body count rises and witnesses start to disappear, it won’t be easy for Stephanie to keep herself clean when everyone else is playing dirty. It’s a good thing Stephanie isn’t afraid of getting a little dirty, too.

If you’ve been here a while you’ll know that this used to be my all time favourite series and that it’s also one I have given up on various times. I stopped buying them in the late teens and gave up, read a few from my library, gave up, read a review copy, gave up, and then this one was read by a family member of mine who works in a bookshop and when she finished she was like “I don’t know how I feel about the ending” and I immediately had FOMO and wanted to know about the ending. What was happening that it felt unusual? Is Stephanie about to make a decision? Did someone die? I was curious.

So, here we are. I read Game On: Tempting Twenty-Eight but I remember nothing about that book and prior to that the last one I read was Turbo Twenty-Three. So I’ve missed a few instalments over the past bunch of years but it doesn’t matter. It never matters. The formula is always exactly the same: what should be a relatively easy assignment becomes extremely complicated, Lula will be Lula, an entirely unbelievable amount of fast food will be consumed, cars and occasionally apartments will be destroyed, everything will resolve in the end and reset to the ‘norm’.

This is a Ranger book, which was why I also wanted to read it because Ranger is my preference and it feels like we never get enough Ranger. Joe is conveniently in Miami for 98% of the book, which gives Ranger a front and centre in this one. He steps in to help Stephanie in a couple of ways and look for the most part, this is actually a pretty enjoyable book. Some of it was ridiculous (pretty much anything concerning Lula these days) but it actually had a pretty decent plot, Stephanie actually figures a lot of things out and even though she’s still crap at her job she mostly gets a lot of stuff done here with minimal assistance in some cases. I found myself realising that these books still have the capacity to make me laugh at loud occasionally but they also still make me roll my eyes. But this felt like a lot of the slapstick I started to hate about these books (Lula, animals, Grandma Mazur, bizarre skips, weirdly talkative bad guys, stalkers, etc) was toned down to more reasonable levels reminiscent of the earlier books.

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I don’t want to spoil the ending and it came as a bit of a surprise. It’s kind of an ending in 2 parts – the first part happens just prior to the end and then next part on the final page. It wasn’t what I was expecting. I’m also not sure how it’s going to go. I suspect the next book could just as easily ‘walk it back’ and open like the ending of this one never happened and we don’t find out what happened or someone was joking or someone’s bluff was called or whatever. But if not….look, it’s interesting? Technically Stephanie agreed to something first. But she also agreed to it without knowing something else and….obviously that changes things. I don’t want it to change things, but it does.

I don’t know what’s going to happen. But for the first time in a long time, I find myself actually caring about it. So yeah, guess I’ll be reading Whatever Thirty-One and who knows, the joke is probably on me. But I did like this.

7/10

Book #244 of 2023

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