I’m slowly running out of Stephanie Plum novels…. I’m not sure if that is a good or a bad thing, I have two more left to go until Tricky Twenty-Two comes out in November.
In Notorious Nineteen Stephanie is on the hunt to solve a mystery of yet another missing FTA. After he went into have his appendix removed, Geoffrey Cubbin went missing in the middle of the night from the hospital. He was about to fail to appear in court after stealing $5,000,000 from a retirement home. Vinnie got nervous and sent Stephanie on an early hunt. Once Stephanie convinced his wife to help her, they were on a mission to figure out where Geoffrey went and what happened to the money.
Stephanie enlisted Grandma Muzar’s help as well as she tried to question people at the retirement center. Grandma kept her in the loop with the burg gossip at funerals and she used it to help piece the mystery together.
In the mean time, Stephanie discovered three more patients who had gone missing from the same hospital. Assuming they were all tied together she realized she had to work with Morelli (as a cop) and the new head of security (also an annoying tag-a-long “friend” from the past), Randy Briggs.
Morelli pushes his cop limits & helps Stephanie hope to uncover the mystery. As they try and work together they are also trying to decide what level of commitment they want in their relationship. Morelli still wants Stephanie to move in, she is thinking she might be ready for marriage, but are they really ready?
Things get blown up, Lula learns how to break into places & Randy Briggs gets shoved in a mailbox. What else would you expect from Stephanie? Lula also teaches us all a valuable lesson in this book, YouTube knows everything.
“God bless YouTube,” Lula said. “You don’t even need to go to college no more because you could learn how to do everything on YouTube.” – Janet Evanovich Notorious Nineteen
Overall I liked Notorious Nineteen and was glad that it changed things up to the point that Morelli worked with Stephanie (instead of Stephanie working with just Ranger). Not that I don’t like Stephanie always relying on Ranger (he of course was still involved and did help when he was needed), but it was nice to see Stephanie and Morelli forced to really work together for the first time in awhile. It was a nice change to the usual Morelli shows up when Stephanie finds a dead body.
I won’t lie, I was still mad at the end of the book, but I did like the rest of the book. I stand by my Ross/Rachel theory, we won’t see Stephanie and Morelli officially end up and married together until Janet Evanovich writes the last book in the series. I just hope she proves me wrong!