High Five - Janet Evanovich

   1999; 317 pages.  Book 5 (out of 25) of the Stephanie Plum series.   New Author? : No.  Genre : Crime-Humor; Beach Novel.  Overall Rating : 8½*/10.

    Dear old Uncle Fred, the family tightwad, is missing.  He’s been gone a couple of days now.  This isn’t overly surprising, since he is 72 years old, and folks are prone to have some “senior moments” at that age.

    He disappeared while running his daily errands – picking up his dry cleaning, going down to the garbage company to gripe about their poor service, and a couple other stops.  His car’s been found, with the dry cleaning stacked neatly on the back seat.  There were no signs of a struggle.   So he’s probably just wandering around in a daze somewhere on the streets of Trenton.

    Luckily, his niece happens to be Stephanie Plum, and she’s a bounty hunter by trade and therefore good at finding people, amiright?  So as a favor to her Aunt Mabel, Uncle Fred’s not-very-grieving wife, she takes on the job, even though it’s a non-paying one.  Besides, how hard can it be to find one lost geezer out on the streets?

    But with every day that goes by without Stephanie finding him, the odds that he’s still alive fall just a little bit more.

What’s To Like...

    High Five is Book 5 (obviously, thanks to the title format) in Janet Evanovich’s humorous, quirky, snarky “Stephanie Plum – Bounty Hunter” series.  At present, there are 25 books in it, with #26 due out in November.  The book’s length is typical for the series (just over 300 pages), as is the number of chapters (15), the setting (Trenton), and the  1^st-person POV narration (Stephanie’s).  I’m reading the series in chronological order, but honestly, I don’t think that’s necessary. 

    As usual, Janet Evanovich blends in a bunch of plotlines to keep the action humming along nicely.  Here, in spoiler-free format, the challenges for Stephanie are:

a.) Find Uncle Fred and figure out why he disappeared,

b.) Bring in three FTA’s (“Failures To Appear”),

c.) Get enough money to pay next month’s rent,

d.) Find a second job to accomplish that'

e.) Solve the body parts pictures mystery' and

f.)  Try not to get killed by several people with several motives.

    I always enjoy the characters in these books, boththe  recurring ones, like Grandma Mazur, and new ones, such as “Bunchy”, who’s a bookie (at least that’s what he claims) and Randy Briggs, a “little person” (his choice of words), who manages to be both an FTA and Stephanie’s roommate.  Lula still uses her favorite phrase, "damn“skippy”, as often as possible; and Stephanie is still torn between Ranger and Joe Morelli as love interests.

     Everything culminates in a satisfying ending.  It’s a bit over-the-top, but that’s okay for a beach read type of story.  The perpetrator gets identified and caught, and the reasons for his/her actions make sense, despite both Stephanie and I being slow to figure them out.  ISTR the Epilogue being used before in this series, but that’s okay too, because it's a teaser for the next book.  I don’t expect much out of epilogues.  High Five is both a standalone novel and part of a series.

Excerpts...

    “I need to know about Tank.  No one will tell me anything.  Is he, um, you know-?”

    “Dead?  No.  Unfortunately.  He was wearing a flak vest.  The impact of the bullet knocked him back and stunned him.  He hit his head when he fell and was out for a while, but he’s fine.  And by the way, where were you when he was shot?”

    “I was stretched out on the floor.  It was past my bedtime.”

    Morelli grinned.  “Let me get this straight.  You didn’t get shot because you fell asleep on the job?”

    “Something like that.  It sounded better the way I phrased it.”  (pg. 61 )

    Barrroooom!  Liftoff.  The garbage truck jumped the pavement.  Tires and doors flew off like Frisbees, the truck bounced down with a jolt, listed to one side, and rolled over onto the furiously burning Porsche, turning it into a Porsche pancake.

    We flattened ourselves against the building while pieces of scrap metal and shreds of rubber rained down around us.

    “Uh-oh,” Lula said.  “All the king’s horses and all the king’s men aren’t gonna put that Porsche back together again.”

    “I don’t get it,” the driver said.  “It was only a scratch.  I hardly scraped against your car.  Why would it explode like that?”

    “That’s what her cars do,” Lula said.  “They explode.”  (pg. 235)

“You turned out pretty good considering your gene pool.”  (pg. 174)

    There are a couple caveats.  First, like any book in this series, there’s a bunch of cussing.  If such language offends you, pass this book by.  And if you’re hoping for a resolution of the sexual tension in the Ranger/Joe/Stephanie romantic triangle, well, it doesn’t happen here.  I have a feeling that story thread in going to continue for quite a few more books.

    For you young’uns, once upon a long time ago, and apparently as late as 1999 when this book was written, you took pictures with something called a “film camera” and when the roll was full, you rushed over to a 1-Hour Film Development store (usually a company  named “Fotomat”) to get the film magically converted into photographs or slides in a mere 60 minutes.  Stephanie utilizes a Fotomat in High Five.  Ages ago, I actually assisted my dad in developing reels of film.  It is a lost art.

    Finally, is it too much to ask that just once a waste management company be portrayed as a decent enterprise?  Yes, it’s a dirty job, but somebody has to do it.  To be fair, at least there was no illegal dumping of hazardous waste going on here, another all-too-common Holly wood trope.

    8½ Stars.  One last bit of statistical trivia, that the Wikipedia article about this series keeps track of.  In High Five there are three FTA’s to be nabbed, and three cars for Stephanie to destroy.  Those are typical numbers for the books in this series, at least so far.