Roast Beef and Dessert--Twelve Sharp

Vickey Meyer
Christine Specht
Contemporary Women’s Fiction
1 August 2008

Roast Beef and Dessert
Janet Evanovich writes with a tantalizing mix of adventure, mystery, and romance, but so do a lot of authors today. What is it about Evanovich’s stories that have inspired readers to devour fourteen books in the Stephanie Plum series and to anticipate the upcoming Hollywood film of One for the Money, the first in the Plum series? This answer, exemplified in Twelve Sharp, can be found in Evanovich’s rich characters and plot twists that contain an element of the ridiculous.
Stephanie Plum is not the stereotypical bounty hunter. She has a weakness for baked goods and her mother’s roast beef. She has a tendency to blow up cars and befriend weird outcasts of society, including a super size ex-hooker named Lula and a transvestite rocker named Sally Sweet. She is in love with her Trenton cop boyfriend Joe Morelli, who is “dangerously close to marriage by pot roast” (Evanovich 86), but she ends the novel eating cake with the deadly Ranger, who can melt chocolate off éclairs (Evanovich 11). This food association is analogous of Stephanie’s relationship with these two hotties. Morelli is hot, home baked sustenance, while Ranger is all dessert. Stephanie’s family adds to the mix with cousin Vinnie, her boss who is rumored to have sexually violated farm animals, Grandma Mazur, who pries up lids at closed casket funerals often causing rampages, and Mr. and Mrs. Plum, who have “an underlying affection that’s expressed mostly through tolerance” (Evanovich 258).
Putting all the idiosyncrasies of these characters into one city, let alone one novel, results in situations which cause the reader to laugh out loud at the same time she covers her mouth in horror. Previous Plum exploits include running Morelli over with a Buick and wrestling a “’naked greased-up fat guy’” (Evanovich 11). In this novel, Evanovich adds a “’food fight with Joyce Barnhardt’” (Evanovich 152), and a bar brawl at a place called the Hole that ends with Morelli stating to another cop, “’you might look for a guy in a red thong. He’s with us’” (Evanovich 93). In addition to those exciting events, we have a funeral riot that is controlled only when the What? starts performing with Sally’s opening of “’Hey all you fuckin’ mourners . . . Are you fuckin’ ready for this?’” (Evanovich 222) and ends with Lula’s claim that she has “’feathers up my ass’” (223). Throw in a visit to Pleasures Treasures where Stephanie gets shot at by “’a seventy-two-year-old porn peddler’” (186), and we have a novel that keeps the reader always on the edge of her seat with no way of guessing what is coming next.
With larger than life characters and a heroine who is a clumsy as her readers and enjoys doughnuts just as much as we do, Evanovich writes a great story. Her over-the-top humor and no-holds-barred language guarantees a lot of laughs while her genius treatment of the ridiculous keeps us turning the pages.