Hello Stephanie Plum!

Re: 'One for the Money' by Janet Evanovich

We get our first introduction to Stephanie Plum in this book. She was born and raised in Trenton, New Jersey in a blue-collar area called The Burg. Stephanie is single and lives in an apartment by herself. But she routinely heads home to have dinner with her mother, father and Grandma Mazur (her grandma on her mom’s side). Stephanie has a married sister - a fact that her mother is always bringing up to her.

Stephanie had been working in Newark as a discount lingerie buyer but got laid off from her job. So she’s been hocking her possessions to come up with money to pay the bills. Unfortunately her Mazda Miata has just been reposessed and she is desperate. Her mother says she should go see her cousin Vinnie Plum as she heard he has a filing job open at his bail bonds company.

When Stephanie gets there she is informed that the filing job has been filled. But Connie, Vinnie’s secretary, talks Stephanie into doing skip tracing. The job involves finding people that don’t show up for their scheduled court appearance. If she succeeds, she can earn 10% of the posted bond amount.

So for Stephanie’s very first assignment, she decides to go after a guy who’s bail was set at $100,000! Doing the math - if Stephanie can bring this guy in to the police station, she can make $10,000!

As she drools over this thought, she asks who the guy is: it’s Joe Morelli. You could say Stephanie is ‘intimately’ acquainted with Morelli as he took away her virginity when she was in high school.

So Stephanie decides to become a ‘bounty hunter’ and go after Morelli.