Janet Evanovich

Janet Evanovich spent a decade collecting rejection letters before she sold her first novel. Raised in New Jersey and trained in art at Douglass College, she wrote romance from her kitchen table as a stay-at-home mother in New Hampshire, eventually publishing close to a dozen romance novels, including her 1987 debut, Hero at Large, under the pseudonym Steffie Hall, before switching genres entirely. That switch produced Stephanie Plum: a laid-off lingerie buyer turned chaotic, car-destroying bail bondsman's apprentice in Trenton, New Jersey, introduced in One for the Money (1994). The Plum novels are comic crime fiction more than straight mystery. Each book sends Stephanie after a hapless bail-jumping skip, but the real draw is Jersey-flavored slapstick, an unresolved love triangle between cop Joe Morelli and security expert Ranger that has stayed deliberately unsettled for over thirty books, and a supporting cast including gun-toting Grandma Mazur. It is one of the longest continuously publishing character mystery series going, with a new entry arriving nearly every year since 1994. New readers should start with One for the Money and read in numbered order; the running jokes and cast build cumulatively, though the mysteries themselves barely matter next to the comedy. Several between-the-numbers holiday novellas are enjoyable but entirely skippable.