Plum Lovin'

Overview

Janet Evanovich's Plum Lovin' drops bounty hunter Stephanie Plum into an unusually domestic assignment. The mysterious Diesel reappears in her apartment with a proposition she can't easily refuse: help him track down Annie Hart, a self-styled relationship expert now wanted on armed robbery and assault charges, and he'll steer her toward the fugitive's trail.

The catch is that Diesel's help comes with strings attached. Stephanie agrees to take over Annie's abandoned matchmaking clients, playing amateur cupid for a string of difficult singles even as she works the actual case. The arrangement layers a lighthearted subplot of botched setups and awkward dates over the more pressing question of where Annie has gone.

That question grows more urgent once it becomes clear Stephanie and Diesel aren't the only ones searching. A volatile rival with a taste for intimidation, and another figure with skills too strange to explain away, are also hunting Annie, and their motives are far less benign than Diesel's. Stephanie is left juggling romantic entanglements of her own, unresolved history with both Ranger and Morelli, and a partner who seems to know more about the case than he's letting on.

A Series Built on Mixing Genres

Plum Lovin' belongs to Evanovich's "Between the Numbers" novellas, the shorter interstitial entries she publishes alongside the numbered Stephanie Plum mysteries. These books lean further into comedy and romance than their numbered counterparts, using Diesel's supernatural undertones and a compressed caper structure to keep the tone brisk and playful rather than procedural.

The novel is emblematic of what has made the broader series a commercial mainstay: a bounty hunter heroine who is more accident-prone than heroic, a rotating cast of oddball secondary characters, and a persistent will-they-won't-they dynamic that spans the entire run. Rather than resolving Stephanie's romantic loyalties, the book uses the matchmaking premise to comment on them obliquely, letting her fumble other people's love lives while her own remains unsettled.

Critically and commercially, the Stephanie Plum series has long been positioned as comfort reading: fast-paced, self-aware, and more interested in comic timing than in the darker realism found elsewhere in crime fiction. Plum Lovin' sits comfortably within that identity, prioritizing banter and farce even as its plot nominally involves armed robbery and pursuit by dangerous men.

Why Plum Lovin' Has Been Challenged

Much of the friction around this book centers on the casual, often flirtatious register in which Evanovich writes about sex, weapons, and violent crime. Stephanie's world is one where a fugitive wanted for armed robbery can also be a source of comic relief, where innuendo between characters is a running gag, and where the mechanics of bounty hunting are treated with a shrug rather than gravity. Readers unfamiliar with the series' tone have sometimes mistaken that lightness for carelessness about serious subject matter.

Objections have focused specifically on the book's sexual content and suggestive dialogue, along with its casual language around guns and physical danger, as inappropriate for younger or unprepared readers who might encounter it shelved alongside more conventional mysteries. The blend of romance-novel sensibility with a crime plot involving weapons charges has struck some challengers as an uneasy mix, even though the violence in the text remains largely off-page and comedic in framing. In the catalog tracked here, that discomfort has translated into a recorded challenge in one state and one school district.