Fearless Fourteen

I keep coming back to the Stephanie Plum books for the same reason I rewatch a sitcom I have seen a hundred times. The pleasure is in the rhythm, not the plot. Fearless Fourteen is one of the better-built episodes, a machine built to keep you entertained while somebody is being threatened with the loss of a hand, and it does the job with a seriousness that most comic writers never reach. It is also, by the end, thinner than the jokes.

St. Martin's Press published it on 17 June 2008. The hardcover runs 310 pages and carries the ISBN 9780312349516. It is the fourteenth Stephanie Plum book, following Plum Lucky and Lean Mean Thirteen. The next volume to arrive was Plum Spooky, a Halloween novella that would take Stephanie into the Pine Barrens with a monkey and a man named Diesel.

Loretta Rizzi and the boy with the game

The book opens in Stephanie's apartment, in a kitchen she describes with more honesty than pride:

The reality is that I keep my Smith & Wesson in the cookie jar, my Oreos in the microwave, a jar of peanut butter and hamster food in the over-the-counter cupboard, and I have beer and olives in the refrigerator.

That is her life in a list. The hamster is Rex. The gun is for work. The beer is not for work.

Then Loretta Rizzi, a woman Stephanie knew as a kid, puts a gun to Stephanie's head. Loretta has skipped her court date on an armed robbery charge, and the only way Stephanie can get her back inside is to hear her out. Loretta's worry is not the sentence. Her worry is her son, Mario, who goes by Zook, a teenager who lives inside an online role-playing game called Minionfire and does not want to be a foster kid or a relative of a bounty hunter.

Loretta has no collateral and no relatives willing to sign for her, so she stays in jail, and Stephanie, who cannot say no to a problem in front of her, becomes a babysitter. Zook comes home with her, and the comedy starts immediately. He does not like her apartment, her car, or her life. He is rude to her hamster, which is a useful measure of his character.

Zook's game spreads like something contagious. Stephanie's grandmother Mazur, a woman with no volume control, plays Minionfire with two friends, and when a rival player ruins her game she complains in terms she learned from the game, not from any living relative. When Zook upsets Stephanie's mother by covering her house in graffiti, Stephanie has to move him to Morelli's place, where he paints Bob the dog's fur in bright colors. Bob is the big orange retriever who belongs to Joe Morelli and Stephanie and eats whatever is put in front of him.

The other half of the Zook problem arrives later. Walter "Mooner" Dunphy, Stephanie's stoner classmate from school, turns up at Morelli's looking for the boy, and turns out to be the infamous Moondog, the player who has been griefing Zook and Grandma Mazur across the game. So the boy nobody wanted has accidentally recruited the worst player on the server, and then the worst player shows up at the house.

A singer, a mink coat, and a monkey

Ranger, Stephanie's mentor and the man she cannot quite commit to, needs her for a job. His firm has been hired to provide security for a singer who has one name, the way Cher and Madonna have one name. Brenda is in town for a concert and a press conference, and she is a walking maintenance problem. Stephanie's suit is black, her handbag is heavy because the gun inside it is unloaded, and Brenda is arguing with her press secretary while wearing a mink coat in a season when animal rights protesters have shown up outside to object to it. Other protesters object to what is under the coat. Both sets of protesters want Brenda's attention, which is exactly what she wants.

Brenda is fictional but recognizable. She demands wine and a stylist, she says something about not wearing underwear in front of Stephanie, her false eyelash falls off during a live television appearance and she blames Stephanie for it, and she decides mid-book that she would like to be a bounty hunter. That last decision puts her in the back seat of Stephanie's car on an apprehension, where she opens the wrong door and releases Susan Stitch's pet monkey, Carl. The monkey runs. Brenda panics. This is the series' standard method of operations: something in the world goes wrong because of a celebrity, and Stephanie has to mop it up.

The other persistent character is Gary, Brenda's cousin and stalker, who was struck by lightning and now claims psychic powers. He is not dangerous. He shows up at Stephanie's parents' kitchen and makes chili, and he has seen a vision of a giant pizza that means danger. Stephanie bargains with him, agreeing to watch for the metaphorical pizza in exchange for his staying out of her way. He later becomes part of Morelli's improvised security team, and his prophecy is eventually paid off in a way I will get to.

Lula, who has worked for Stephanie's cousin Vinnie for years and is the loudest and funniest woman in the book, has become engaged to Tank, Ranger's second in command. Tank is a large quiet man who cannot remember proposing and who faints at the thought of marriage. Lula plans the wedding anyway, in detail, including a pink tuxedo. The engagement is a running thread that has nothing to do with the case and everything to do with who these people are.

Nine million and a concrete floor

Loretta is bailed out. Within hours she is kidnapped, and her abandoned car is found with blood in it. Her brother is Dom Rizzi, who has just walked out of prison after serving time for a bank robbery worth nine million dollars. Dom is certain that Morelli is the father of Zook, because Loretta never said who the father was, and he decides that Morelli has cost his family everything. He threatens Morelli, and then he shoots at him.

That money is the engine of the book. Nine million dollars disappeared in the robbery, and everyone involved assumes the cash is buried near Morelli's house. It is worse than that. Morelli had a concrete floor poured over his basement after he inherited the place, a floor that would have belonged to Dom had Dom not been convicted. So the only place the money could be is under a slab that nobody wants to cut open.

The bodies start appearing. Stephanie and Mooner find a dead man in Morelli's basement, Allen Gratelli, who has no visible connection to Morelli at all except through the robbery. Another of the partners, Stanley Zero, is already dead in his own apartment when Stephanie goes looking for him, and Stanley's estranged wife Lisa Zero gives her a piece of information about a map or a set of directions. Stephanie and Lula find Gratelli's silver Camry, where a briefcase on the back seat is booby-trapped and sprays them both with blue dye. The directions inside are ruined. Stephanie spends the rest of the day blue.

Dom is staying with an old friend named Jelly Kantner. Stephanie breaks into Jelly's apartment to look for him and hides under the bed when two men arrive asking after Dom. From under the bed she learns they are two of the other partners in the robbery. Then the living room explodes. Stephanie gets out through a bedroom window and lands in the backyard as emergency vehicles arrive.

Mooner, the potato cannon, and the treasure hunters

Because Morelli's house is full of people and no longer safe, he hires Mooner to provide security. Mooner's security is a potato cannon, homemade, fired at people who approach too close. Zook and Gary are hired as well, which means the household now includes a teenager with a paint problem, a psychic with a chili problem, and a man who thinks a spud is a weapon of war.

Money, meanwhile, is loose in the world. Brenda, now trying her hand at investigative reporting, says on television that the stolen cash is buried in Morelli's yard. Within days, treasure hunters arrive with shovels and dig up the lawn, the flower beds and Morelli's patience. Morelli, who is already feeding everyone who keeps turning up at his door, ends up paying Zook, Mooner and Gary to keep the diggers away. Grandma Mazur joins the diggers at night, then gets caught in a cemetery at midnight trying to unearth a family fortune that somebody buried decades ago.

The tone stays comic even as the stakes get worse, which is the series' great trick. Then the tone leaves for a moment. A brick comes through Morelli's window wrapped around a package, and inside the package is a severed pinkie toe and a note saying more presents are coming until the money is paid. After that the book stops pretending that the joke is the only thing at stake.

The fourth partner

Whoever is holding Loretta knows everything that happens at Morelli's house. Stephanie works out why when she finds a camera mounted on the house across the street, pointed at Morelli's windows. Morelli sends a lab technician to disable it, and when Stephanie talks to the technician she recognizes his voice. It is the voice of one of the two men who came looking for Dom in Jelly Kantner's apartment. He is the fourth partner in the robbery, the one nobody had identified, and he has been running the whole operation from somewhere in the middle of the police case.

He calls Stephanie directly. He wants the real money by noon the next day, in exchange for Loretta, and if she tries to hand over a fake, he will start taking her apart. The police prepare a duplicate van loaded with counterfeit bills, and Stephanie goes undercover with a wire to pick up the van from a storage facility. On the telephone the fourth partner tells her he already knows the money is fake. He has been watching. He knows the plan because he was always in the room.

The deli

The climax is a chase that behaves like a cartoon chase, which is exactly why it works. Dom turns up and agrees to take the fourth partner to the money, and Stephanie tries to convince him to stall until the police arrive. He refuses. Stephanie, Mooner, Zook and Gary pursue them, followed by Brenda and her television crew, who are filming because Brenda has decided that being near danger is good for her brand.

The fourth partner gets away in the van. Mooner fires a potato through the windshield, and the van swerves into a deli. The van explodes. The fourth partner dies, the stolen money flies through the air, and the crowd on the pavement gets pelted with nine million dollars in bills and frozen groceries. Loretta is found alive in a basement, unharmed, with all ten of her toes intact. Gary's prophecy comes true when a flying frozen pizza hits Brenda in the face. Mooner collects some of the cash off the street and gives most of it away, because that is what Mooner does.

The book ends where it started, with everybody in Morelli's house watching the footage on television. Dom says he no longer wants to kill Morelli. Loretta explains that she never slept with Morelli as a teenager, and that Mario's father was Lenny Garvis, Morelli's old school classmate, who choked on a peanut-butter sandwich. So one of the book's threads closes tidily, the money scatters across a Trenton street, and the rest of the crowd goes home.

What works and what does not

The jokes are the draw, and they are better than the mystery. Lula, Grandma Mazur, Mooner, Tank, Gary, Brenda and the monkey are all funnier than the criminals are frightening, and the prose moves fast enough that you rarely notice the plot has no idea what it is doing. The corpse in the basement is a piece of the mechanism rather than a person, and the book treats it that way, which is either the joke or the problem depending on your taste. If you want a book that leaves you grinning and slightly dazed, this delivers that with more reliability than most comic fiction.

The mystery itself is thin, and reviewers said so at the time. Publishers Weekly called it one of the less cohesive entries in the series and noted the number of unresolved subplots. One reader who had worked her way through the series had to force herself to finish it, complaining that nothing had really happened and that no character had moved an inch. The coincidence rate is high: the same family produced the bounty, the fugitive, the kidnapper, the rival robber and the man whose corpse turns up in the basement, so the case feels designed rather than discovered. The violence is played for laughs, which is the deal of the series, but it is a deal some readers have stopped accepting.

It is a machine built for series momentum. The jokes are why people buy it, the mystery is scaffolding, and the book understands that perfectly well about itself.

Where the series goes next

Fearless Fourteen does not end with a new threat ringing in the distance. It ends with a television, an argument about who stole the money, and a set of loose ends: Dom is still free, Brenda is leaving New Jersey for a reality show with Gary, Mooner has a security business that pays in potatoes, and nobody has figured out where the nine million went.

The next Plum book to arrive was Plum Spooky, a between-the-numbers novella published in January 2009. That is the one where Stephanie loses her car, adopts Carl the monkey, meets Diesel, and gets lost in the Pine Barrens with no bars on her phone. Readers who associate the Pine Barrens and the monkey with this stretch of the series have the order backwards; the Barrens belong to Plum Spooky. Finger Lickin' Fifteen followed in June 2009, with Lula chasing a cook-off and a reward.

What stays with me is not the plot but the rhythm. These books arrive on a schedule, each one built the same way, and the pleasure is knowing the machine well enough to hear the jokes coming. Fearless Fourteen is a slightly tired night in a long run, and a tired night in a good show is still a good time.