Four to Score (Stephanie Plum Series #4) Book

10 steps to writing a Stephanie Plum novel:

1. give stephanie a "skip" who isn't easy to find immediately or who disappears, thus leaving her feeling "funky" in her gut
2. include several scenes where stephanie finds herself with her "skip" but the "skip" is not caught - actually, make one scene involve stephanie getting her own equipment used against her and you'll meet this requirement
3. toss in a few "dinners at home" with her funny/dysfunctional family, including her gun-totin' grannie and her mother who serves dinner at 6. sharp.
4. throw in a couple of scenes involving either stephanie's ex hubby dickie or his mistress joyce. focus on stephanie's blind rage.
5. scatter delicately several scenes involving joe morelli and his voracious sex drive.
6. add 2-4 scenes of the cryptic ranger, usually assisting stephanie in her attempts at apprehension
7. make your real "big bad" someone who is both the least likely person possible and someone who is vaguely connected to both stephanie's skip and whatever case joe morelli is supposed to be working on when he's not trying to sex up ms. plum
8. include a scene at the end where stephanie almost gets killed by the big bad but is rescued by one of her many colorful sidekicks
9. end on an ambiguous note, usually pertaining to the state of joe and stephanie's relationship
10. mention hairspray, spandex, the burg, the rangers, cars, surveillance, and doughnuts at whim.

truth be told, this one is my favorite so far. i laughed out loud several times, my favorite involving a scene where sally sweet (stephanie's new transvestite sidekick), lula (the 250 pound former hooker who helps stephanie), grandma mazur (the gun-totin' grannie who looks for "babes" and dresses like her granddaughter) and stephanie (the bounty hunter) get held up at knifepoint. three of the four have guns on them; i'll let you guess who was the odd man out.

finally some development in the morelli-plum relationship. of course, evanovich has to blow up stephanie's bedroom at 2am thus forcing her to stay at morelli's place for a couple of days (hello awkward plot device)...my only beef was this: after the steamy love connection, stephanie (and we the readers) are faced with the cold reality of the morning after, when morelli's hair is now too long (no longer sexy) and he fails to meet her high standards of having a cookie jar in his kitchen. when i read books like these, i want a departure from the mundane. i HAVE the reality; i don't need to be reminded of it in my crap-fiction. you dig? an odd moment of truth in an otherwise delightful installment of predictability.