Ten Big Ones

Ten Big Ones is the tenth Stephanie Plum novel, and by this point in the series you know exactly what you are getting: a Trenton bounty hunter with a bad car, a worse luck, and two men too good for her to sort out. What makes this one worth reading is that Evanovich finally lets a thread from the real world into her comic Trenton. The gang plot gives the book a genuine edge, and the ordinary absurdity of Stephanie's life, the FTAs, the family dinners, the exploding vehicles, has to work against something that is actually scary.

I have read a lot of these books, and the series formula matters. Half the pleasure is the ritual: Grandma Mazur at a viewing, Lula eating, Morelli in the kitchen, Ranger showing up in the middle of the night. Ten Big Ones keeps all the ritual and raises the danger, and the result is one of the better entries in the run.

The deli and the devil mask

The inciting incident is pure Stephanie. She and Lula are waiting outside a deli when a young man in a red Devil mask runs out carrying the proceeds of a robbery, only to discover that his getaway bicycle has a flat tire. Lula shot it, having been trying to prove she could shoot at all after Stephanie doubted her. Cornered, the robber throws a Molotov cocktail into the store, the owner throws it back out, and it explodes into Stephanie's car. The truck she loses is not the first and will not be the last.

It is a great comic scene that turns serious fast. The man behind the mask is a member of a Trenton gang called the Comstock Street Slayers, and Detective Joe Morelli, Stephanie's on-and-off boyfriend, tells her that gang activity in the city is getting worse. Worse still, if the Red Devil thinks Stephanie can identify him, the gang may decide she is a liability.

The Slayers and Junkman

Stephanie does exactly the wrong thing, or at least the thing that guarantees trouble. She spots the Red Devil and several others at a fast food drive-through and calls the police. The gang opens fire with automatic weapons and wounds her friend, Officer Eddie Gazzara, before escaping. Now it is personal, and now she is genuinely frightened, which is why she refuses Morelli's offer to put her under house arrest in his own home. Stephanie has never liked being managed, even when the manager is right.

The situation gets a name when she realizes that one of her outstanding skips, a man called Anton Ward, is the Red Devil. She and Lula and Connie bail Ward out of jail and drive him to Vincent Plum's second home in Point Pleasant, planning to intimidate him into talking. They cannot intimidate him, which is a running joke about how bad Stephanie is at being tough, but when Ranger returns from an out-of-state trip he extracts the information in about five minutes.

What Ward confesses is the spine of the book. The Slayers' Trenton captain was killed, so the gang imported Junkman, a ranking member from the Los Angeles branch, to fill the vacancy. To prove himself, Junkman has to work through a list of targets: two rival gang members, a police officer, and finally Stephanie, who has humiliated the gang by arresting several of its members. As a female bounty hunter, she is a specific insult to them, and the plan they have for her before Junkman kills her is sickening. The novel treats this as it should, as the thing that makes the whole plot unbearable rather than funny.

Ranger's apartment and the series' big reveal

The best structural move in the book is what Stephanie does with the threat. Ranger loans her a truck from his security company fleet, and on a whim she follows the truck's GPS to its previous location, which turns out to be a fortified office building with a luxurious apartment on the top floor. She decides to hide out there, partly out of desperation and partly out of curiosity, and in doing so she learns something the series has guarded for nine novels.

She has discovered the location of Ranger's office and home. For a character whose whole mystique rests on being untouchable and unknowable, that is enormous. Ranger is the former Special Forces soldier turned bounty hunter and security entrepreneur who has trained Stephanie, saved her life repeatedly, and been the most consistent temptation in the series. Letting her into his space is a form of intimacy he does not ordinarily permit, and the novel is smart about making it about safety rather than romance. The apartment is a fortress, and Stephanie living in it is a sign of how serious things have gotten.

Meanwhile the tedium of the job goes on in parallel. She still has FTAs to find, including Roger Banker, Harold Pancek, Carol Cantell, Salvatore Sweet, Anton Ward, Shoshanna Brown, and Jamil Rodriguez. The bounty hunting scenes are the comic counterweight to the gang threat, and one of them, the capture of Sally Sweet, turns out to set up the ending.

Sally Sweet and the bridal shower

Sally Sweet is a former transvestite rock musician who first appeared back in Four to Score, and he returns here because the Plum family has hired him as a wedding planner. Sally knows everything about women's clothing, he is sweet and brave and completely unequipped for the situation he ends up in, and Evanovich uses him perfectly.

The threat appears to end when Morelli tells Stephanie that someone tentatively identified as Junkman has been arrested. Relieved, she goes to her sister Valerie's bridal shower. While the party is going on, Sally and his band are playing. Stephanie steps outside and is grabbed without warning and taken to a children's playground where the Slayers hold court at night. The arrest was a false alarm, and now she is at the mercy of the gang.

Then Sally drives a school bus onto the scene and opens fire with a fully automatic Uzi, killing several of the members including Junkman. It is absurd, it is exactly the kind of thing this series does, and it is also genuinely satisfying because Sally is the last person anyone would have cast as the cavalry. Before the police and Ranger's men arrive, Stephanie plants dropped guns in the hands of the dead gang members so the scene reads as self-defense. Morelli and Ranger arrive to find that they have been upstaged by a man in a strapless dress, and they congratulate him. The city posts a ten thousand dollar reward for Junkman's capture, and that is where the title comes from.

The love triangle and the formula

The Morelli and Ranger question runs underneath everything. Morelli is the safe option, the man who wants to marry her, feed her, and keep her off the streets. Ranger is the dangerous option, a man who appears when needed and refuses to be pinned down. Ten Big Ones keeps the tension unresolved, as the series always does, and uses the threat on Stephanie's life to force her into proximity with Ranger in a way that heightens the ambiguity without resolving it.

The supporting cast is in good form. Lula is working her own subplot about wanting more from her life and her relationship, which mostly functions as comedy but occasionally lands as real character growth. Grandma Mazur gets her funeral scenes. And the Plum family machine grinds on around Valerie's wedding, which gives the book its domestic texture and its sense that Stephanie's dangerous job is happening in the gaps of a normal life.

The cars, the city, and the running gags

Ten Big Ones also confirms that the destruction of Stephanie's vehicles has become a load-bearing joke of the series. The deli incident firebombs a Ford Escape. Later the gang sprays graffiti on a two hundred dollar Lincoln Town Car and shoots it to pieces, which is less funny when you remember that Stephanie is broke and the car was all she could afford. Even Big Blue, the long-suffering family standby, gets tagged before Morelli has it detailed back to normal, and the detail that it survives is treated as a small miracle.

The car carnage works because it stands in for something real. Stephanie is a woman with no money, a dangerous job, and a family that asks why she cannot settle down, and every wrecked car is her life falling apart in a way she has to laugh about or cry about. Evanovich never lets the joke get mean. The cars are jokes and they are also the cost of doing a job nobody respects.

The Trenton setting is sharper here than in most of the books. Evanovich has said she kept in touch with the Trenton police, and that the Bloods and Crips had moved into the area and caused real problems, and the Comstock Street Slayers are drawn from that. The gang members speak and behave like people who have watched too much television and are performing an idea of violence, which makes them ridiculous and terrifying at once. Junkman, an outsider brought in to prove himself, is the most frightening figure in the book precisely because he has something to prove.

Lula, Grandma, and the people around Stephanie

Part of why the series lasts is the ensemble, and Ten Big Ones gives several of them something to do. Lula is the most memorable. She is the former file clerk and streetwalker turned bounty hunter who works cases with Stephanie, and her subplot about her boyfriend Tank and about wanting more out of her life gives her a rare moment of interiority. Lula is usually the comic engine, and here she gets to be a person, at least for a chapter or two.

Grandma Mazur remains the best running character in the series, an elderly woman who views funerals as social occasions and has no fear of anything, including the people threatening her granddaughter. Connie Rosoli, the office manager at Vincent Plum Bail Bonds, is steady and essential, and the moment when the three women try to interrogate Anton Ward and fail completely is a great summary of the series' attitude toward its own characters. They are not professionals. They are people with nerve and bad judgment, and that is the joke and the charm.

The family plot around Valerie's wedding gives the book its shape as a slice of life. Valerie is pregnant and about to marry, the shower and the wedding planning become the civilian baseline against which the gang threat stands out, and Sally Sweet's hiring as wedding planner is the kind of coincidence that Evanovich turns into a punchline instead of a problem. When the climax lands at the shower, it lands because the book has spent chapters setting that room up as a place of harmless celebration.

What works and what does not

The strengths are the balance of tones and the pacing. Evanovich is very good at shifting from a genuinely frightening scene to a joke without whiplash, and the Sally Sweet rescue is one of the series' best set pieces. The gang plot makes Trenton feel like a real place with real problems, and the Ranger apartment reveal gives long time readers a genuine payoff.

The weaknesses are the weaknesses of the formula. The mystery is thin, and the resolution depends on coincidence and on Sally Sweet happening to be in exactly the right place with exactly the right weapon. Some of the jokes repeat earlier books, and the recurring threat to Stephanie's safety is starting to feel like a structure the series leans on rather than a source of new tension. The love triangle, by book ten, has stopped being a triangle and become a holding pattern.

Even so, this is one of the more memorable Plum novels because it lets the outside world in. The gang violence is grounded in the real Trenton that Evanovich researched, and the book's darkest threat gives the comedy something to push against. If you are reading the series in order, do not skip it, and if you are choosing one for a trip, this one has enough plot to carry the laughs.