Seven Up

What's inside (8 sections)

1. An easy FTA with a body in the shed
2. Benny, Ziggy and Morelli watching
3. Valerie moves home and Grandma asks questions
4. The missing heart and Richmond
5. Pig heart swap and the basement rescue
6. The showdown and why this one still makes me laugh
7. Key takeaways
8. FAQ

I picked up Seven Up because I wanted to see Stephanie Plum when she is no longer brand new but still a mess in the best way. This is book seven in the Stephanie Plum series, first published in 2001 by St. Martin's Press, and the first hardcover runs 309 pages. Janet Evanovich is back in Trenton, New Jersey, with bounty hunter Stephanie, cop Joe Morelli, mysterious Ranger, Lula, Connie, Grandma Mazur, and a hamster named Rex who still spins at night. The case sounds simple. Bring in a tired old mob guy who skipped court on a cigarette charge. It turns into dead bodies, a missing heart, kidnapped grandmothers, and two proposals that could change her life.

What keeps me coming back to this one is how funny and dark it gets at once without losing its footing. One chapter has Stephanie doing surveillance with pastries. A few chapters later she is staring at a corpse in a shed. Evanovich lets both tones sit side by side. I laughed a lot and I also felt for Mooner and Dougie, two sweet stoner friends who get in way over their heads. If you watched the early books build the love triangle and the Burg family chaos, this is where the formula feels confident. It is also weirder than the earlier cases. A human heart in a cooler. A pig heart from a butcher. A dog with stomach issues eating the furniture.

Stephanie narrates herself, broke as usual, driving cars that die, wearing jeans to work to annoy her mother. She is braver now with a gun but still talks herself into dumb moves. That mix is why the series lasts.

An easy FTA with a body in the shed

Vinnie gives Stephanie what should be a gift. Eddie DeChooch, in his seventies, semi retired from the mob, caught moving contraband cigarettes from Richmond, Virginia into Trenton. He missed court. He is always spotted around town in a borrowed white Cadillac, buying lottery tickets, visiting old friends, coughing in the cold. How hard can it be to cuff an old man who naps all afternoon.

Stephanie finds him home and deeply depressed, sitting in a dim house that smells of soup and medicine. He shuffles, he mumbles, he slips out the back while she is checking rooms. She searches for clues about where he goes and finds something worse in the shed out back. Loretta Ricci, an older woman, dead, shot several times. Stephanie calls it in with shaking hands.

Morelli arrives fast because murder is his ground. He tells Stephanie to drop DeChooch and leave the killing to police. She cannot. The bond is hers, the body was on her search, and Vinnie will lose money if she quits. Connie runs the paperwork and warns her that old mob guys have long memories and friends who do favors.

The FTA list for the book is short and telling. Eddie DeChooch leads it, with Roseanne Kreiner and Melvin Baylor as side files Stephanie juggles for cash. She likes the side files because they pay rent. She hates them because they take time from the main hunt. One skip hides behind a dryer. Another cries and offers pie. Evanovich writes these quick pickups with speed and jokes, which keeps the main plot from getting too heavy too early.

I liked how Evanovich shows Stephanie learning. She checks doors from the side now. She keeps cuffs ready. She calls in location updates, sometimes. She still walks into houses alone when she should wait. When she tells herself she is being careful while stepping into DeChooch dark hallway with a flashlight she barely holds straight, I recognized every bad decision I have made at midnight.

Benny, Ziggy and Morelli watching

Stephanie is not the only one looking for DeChooch. Two mob connected men, Benny and Ziggy, start showing up everywhere she goes. They sit in her apartment uninvited. They eat her food. They ask what she knows in voices that stay polite and mean it as a threat. They want whatever DeChooch lost, and they think Stephanie can lead them to it.

Morelli is also circling, but for different reasons. He is living with Stephanie part time at this point, sleeping over, arguing about dishes, acting like a husband without the paper. He brings home case files and tells her nothing. He asks her to stay out of the Ricci killing because the details are ugly. She hears love and control in the same sentence. They fight, they make up, they fight again about Ranger.

Ranger stays on the edge for much of the first half. He appears to check her car for bombs, to teach her a move, to drop a spare gun. He does not push. Then late in the book he makes his offer clear. Help me catch DeChooch and spend one night with me, dusk to dawn, no promises after. Stephanie promised that once before in a weak moment. He remembers. Morelli does not know the full terms, but he senses the pull.

The car deaths pile up the way they always do in Plum books. Stephanie Honda CRV dies in vivid fashion. Mary Mason Cadillac Seville gets hit by a train during one chase sequence that made me laugh even as I winced. Evanovich uses wrecked cars as a running meter for danger. One dead car means trouble. Two means someone wants you scared. Three means you should have listened to Ranger about checking the back seat.

What works here is that the men have jobs to do beyond romance. Morelli does real police work, leaning on informants, tracing the Richmond trip, pushing the medical examiner for time of death. Ranger does real protection, following Stephanie without smothering her, pulling Mooner out of bad spots. Even Benny and Ziggy, scary as they are, have a kind of work code. They threaten, they wait, they report back. Trenton feels lived in, not staged.

Valerie moves home and Grandma asks questions

Home gets loud. Stephanie perfect older sister Valerie shows up with two kids after her California life collapses. Her husband left her for the teenage babysitter. Valerie, who married well and never let Stephanie forget it, now needs a bedroom in the Burg, school enrollment help, and a job. She cycles through plans fast. Become a bounty hunter like Stephanie. Become a lesbian. Sue someone. Sell something. Go back to school. Her daughters, usually described as terrors by Stephanie with love, tear through the house, fight over cereal, and adore Grandma Mazur.

Helen Plum, their mother, tries to hold dinner together with roast and potatoes while everyone talks at once. Frank Plum grunts and reads the paper and hates when crime follows Stephanie to the table. Grandma Mazur steals every scene she is in. She asks blunt questions about lesbians because Valerie mentioned the word and she wants facts. She carries a gun she should not carry. She goes to viewings at Stiva funeral home for entertainment and gossip. She asks Stephanie if Morelli proposed yet and if Ranger is still hot.

Bob, the big orange dog Stephanie got in an earlier book, eats everything. He is bulimic in the running joke sense, gulping food and furniture and then looking guilty. Couches lose cushions. Shoes vanish. Stephanie loves him and yells at him in the same breath.

I love these chapters because they slow the heart hunt without stalling it. Valerie trying on Lula outfits for bounty work is pure comedy. Lula, ex hooker turned file clerk who wants to hunt full time, tells Valerie the truth about heels and running. Connie laughs so hard she has to sit down. Under the jokes, though, there is something tender. Valerie was always the good daughter. Now she is broke and embarrassed. Stephanie, always the black sheep, knows how to find apartments, stretch food money, and talk to cops. For once Stephanie gets to be the competent sister. Evanovich does not underline it. She just lets Stephanie hand Valerie a blanket and show her where the extra towels are.

The missing heart and Richmond

Connie cracks the case sideways through family. Her relatives still talk to mob wives and drivers. Word comes back that DeChooch is desperate to find a human heart. Not money. Not files. A heart.

The backstory is gross and sad and very Evanovich. When DeChooch was in Richmond picking up cigarettes from Louis Louie D. DiStephano, Louie D. died of a sudden heart attack. DeChooch called his boss in Trenton for instructions. The boss said to bring the body back for burial. DeChooch misheard bring the fart, as in a slangy insult for an old guy, as bring the heart. Or some version of that garbled phone line. He cut out Louie D. heart, packed it in a cooler, and drove it north. Then he lost it.

Louie widow, Sophia DiStephano, is not a grieving background figure. She is furious, connected, and willing to hurt people to get her husband piece back for proper burial and pride. She sends Benny and Ziggy to lean on Stephanie. She watches Mooner and Dougie because DeChooch used them as mules.

Mooner and Dougie are the soft center of the book. Mooner, Stephanie gentle stoner friend with a big heart and short memory, is frantic because his roommate and best friend Dougie Kruper has vanished. Dougie drove a cooler to Richmond for DeChooch without asking what was inside. He left it unattended for a bit. A neighborhood dog got into it and ate the contents. Dougie, clueless, delivered an empty cooler to Sophia people and came home thinking he did a good job. When Mooner tells Stephanie this over cereal, with Bob drooling nearby, the horror and comedy land together. Of course a dog ate the heart. Of course no one checked.

Stephanie tries to smoke DeChooch out by claiming she has what he lost. She drops hints at bonds office, at the funeral home, at the deli. DeChooch bites but stays hidden, moving between old girlfriends houses and basements. Morelli tells her she is painting a target on herself. She knows. She does it anyway because Mooner is crying and Valerie kids need quiet and someone has to move the case.

Richmond matters because it shows DeChooch was never a mastermind here. He is old, hard of hearing, tired, and scared of Sophia and of his own boss. He thought he was being loyal by bringing the heart north. Now he cannot fix it. He naps, he coughs, he watches game shows too loud. That does not make him safe. Scared old men with guns still shoot.

Pig heart swap and the basement rescue

DeChooch makes his move by taking Grandma Mazur. He grabs her fast, holds her somewhere quiet, and calls Stephanie. Bring me the heart and she walks. No cops. No Ranger. Just you.

Stephanie does not have a human heart. She has a butcher. She goes to the shop, explains almost nothing, pays cash, and gets a pig heart packed on ice. It looks close enough in a cooler to fool a panicked old man for a minute. Lula drives her, talking nonstop to keep her calm, telling her she is nuts and brave in the same sentence. Connie stays on the phone. Morelli is not told until after because Stephanie knows he would stop her.

The swap works just long enough. DeChooch takes the cooler, peers in, breathes hard. Grandma, unimpressed, scolds him for grabbing old ladies and asks if he has food. Stephanie pulls her out while DeChooch realizes the texture and size are wrong. He does not shoot. He yells. He looks embarrassed and furious at being tricked by a girl and a pig.

That should end it, but Sophia still has Mooner and Dougie. With Ranger help, Stephanie tracks them to the basement of Sophia house in Richmond. Sophia has been holding them and hurting them to get the heart location. The basement is cold, damp, with ropes and tools laid out to scare. Mooner is dazed. Dougie keeps apologizing. Ranger moves first, quiet and fast, cutting ties, checking doors. Stephanie talks to keep Sophia looking at her instead of the boys. They get Mooner and Dougie out. Sophia slips away before police arrive, which annoyed me in a good way. Not every villain gets cuffed on page.

The drive home is quiet. Mooner cries a little. Dougie asks if the dog that ate the heart will be okay, which is such a Dougie question. Ranger cleans Stephanie cut and tells her she did fine. Lula brings sandwiches and does not joke for once. I liked that Evanovich lets them sit in the aftermath instead of rushing to the next gag. Two goofy friends almost died over a cooler they did not understand.

Back in Trenton, Stephanie checks on Grandma, who is already telling the story at the kitchen table with gestures. Valerie listens with wide eyes and says bounty hunting sounds hard. Helen tells Stephanie she is going to get killed and serves more potatoes. It is familiar and warm and exactly what Stephanie needs before the last confrontation.

The showdown and why this one still makes me laugh

Stephanie goes to DeChooch house to end it. No backup in the room, though Morelli and Ranger are close. She asks him straight. Did you kill Loretta Ricci. He says no, and his answer is so strange and human I believed him. Loretta tried to help him with his impotence, enthusiastically, and gave herself a fatal heart attack in the process. He panicked about looking foolish and weak, so he shot her body after death to hide the real cause and make it look like a mob hit. He says it flat, ashamed, tired.

Before Stephanie can process that, Sophia walks in with a gun. She wants an eye for an eye. She tells Stephanie to cut out DeChooch heart right there. Stephanie, who has a knife in her hand from the kitchen, refuses to become an executioner. She stalls, talks, moves sideways the way Ranger taught her. When Sophia lunges, Stephanie fights back with spray and weight and noise. Police come in loud. Sophia is arrested. DeChooch sits down heavily and says he is done running. He has one shred of pride left. He wants Ranger to bring him in, not a woman. Ranger, professional to the end, cuffs him gently while Stephanie stands there scraped and shaking.

Vinnie gets his bond release. Stephanie gets paid, minus the usual costs of tow trucks, broken locks, ruined clothes, and dead cars. She goes home to Rex spinning in his soup can home and Bob snoring on ruined cushions. Morelli proposes marriage, or close to it, wanting normal and safe. Ranger reminds her of her promise. One night, dusk to dawn, because he helped her bring DeChooch in. She does not choose on page. The book closes with that buzzing tension still alive.

Fair criticism first. The mystery is not tight if you want clues and deduction. The heart mix up is revealed through talk, not sleuthing. Benny and Ziggy never become full people. Loretta and Louie D. are plot devices more than characters. The police look slow so Stephanie can stumble into answers. The tone whips from slapstick to sexual threat fast, especially around Sophia torture scenes and Grandma kidnapping. If stalking, mob threats, or jokes about sex will bother you, this will grate even though the villains lose.

The comic sleaze also runs high. Vinnie is pure sweat and innuendo. Lula sex jokes come rapid fire. Valerie lesbian talk is played for laughs in a way that feels dated now. I winced twice and laughed three times on the same page, which is pretty normal for mid series Plum.

Still, as a 2001 St. Martin's Press hardcover at 309 pages, it does what book seven should do. It rewards long time readers with Morelli living in drawers, Ranger waiting in shadows, Lula demanding field work, Connie working phones, Grandma holding court at Stiva, Valerie humbled, Mooner loyal, Dougie lost. It gives new readers a complete ride without homework. Mud wrestling, motorcycles, fast cars, fast food, fast men, all the cover promises, all delivered with Trenton texture.

Skip it if you need forensic realism or if kidnapping and torture scenes will upset you even when the victims survive. Pick it up if you want an easy FTA that turns into a missing heart, a pig heart swap, a Richmond basement rescue, a train versus Cadillac, and a final choice between marriage and one night dusk to dawn. I finished my copy late, tired, fond of everyone including the dog who eats couches, and ready for Hard Eight.

FAQ

Why is Eddie DeChooch wanted in Seven Up?

He was moving contraband cigarettes from Richmond into Trenton for the mob. He skipped court, so Vinnie assigned Stephanie to bring him back for the bond.

Why is DeChooch looking for a human heart?

He misheard his boss on the phone and thought he was told to bring back Louie D. heart after a fatal heart attack. He lost the cooler on the way north.

Is Seven Up part of the Stephanie Plum series?

Yes. Seven Up from 2001 is book seven in the Stephanie Plum series, after Hot Six and before Hard Eight, with Morelli, Ranger, Lula and Grandma Mazur.