Elsie Hawkins

About the Elsie Hawkins series

Before Stephanie Plum, there was Elsie Hawkins: a sharp-tongued, matchmaking older woman who turns up in four early Evanovich category romances, nudging a different mismatched couple together in each one. Back to the Bedroom, Smitten, Wife for Hire, and The Rocky Road to Romance are all standalone romances with their own hero and heroine, but Elsie recurs across all four as a connective thread, and Evanovich has said the character was the direct inspiration for gun-toting, foul-mouthed Grandma Mazur in the Stephanie Plum books -- reading Elsie in action makes that lineage obvious.

These are short, breezy late-1980s category romances rather than the crime-comedy Evanovich is now known for, but the comic timing and voice that would define Plum are already fully formed here. Published in quick succession between 1989 and 1991, before Evanovich reinvented herself with One for the Money in 1994, the series is really the missing link between her early romance-writing years and the Plum era. Long out of print, the four books were later repackaged and reissued as ebooks, introducing them to Plum fans curious about Evanovich's roots.

How to read this series

There's no ongoing plot to follow -- each book has a different central couple -- but Elsie Hawkins appears in all four, and reading them in original publication order (Back to the Bedroom, Smitten, Wife for Hire, The Rocky Road to Romance) is the easiest way to watch her character recur without spoiling anything. Any book can be picked up on its own if you just want a quick, funny late-1980s-style romance, but series completists and Grandma Mazur fans curious about her inspiration will get the most out of reading all four.