The exchanges between her and Stephanie, and the deep friendship there, keep the book moving along nicely, especially with the surreal situations they always manage to find themselves up to their necks in. I'm very happy that Lula is given a large part to play in Twelve Sharp as she is one of my absolute favourite characters and the way she is portrayed is fabulous. Evanovich's eye for detail also comes into play when describing the surroundings etc - again, you feel like you're there. The characters are written about in such detail and with an uncanny observation for the weird and wonderful that the reader feels like they really know them. Melvin Pickle, pervert filing assistant, and Dave and Scooter, homosexual funeral parlour owners fresh out of mortuary college, all make their debut in Twelve Sharp, and I'm hoping they become regulars in future books. Twelve Sharp features all of the familiar characters we have grown to know and love from the previous books in the series - Morelli the cop, Ranger the bounty hunter extraordinaire, Grandma Mazur, Lula (ex-ho and now filing clerk and trainee bounty hunter), Sally Sweet (cross-dressing rock star and part-time school bus driver), and Connie (long-suffering office manager of Vincent Plum bail bonds), plus arch-enemy Joyce Barnhardt, with a couple of new characters also being established. The action is always fast-paced and at times surreal, but make no mistake: after reading Twelve Sharp, or indeed any of the Stephanie Plum books before it, you WILL want to gear up in your best leather finery and be a bounty hunter too! However, none of this matters to the legions of Evanovich fans as the books are all distinctly different, peppered with old favourite characters and new even crazier ones, and plenty of Stephanie's cars blowing up in the process. Yes, the plots are all basically the same - Stephanie Plum, bounty hunter and fast food freak, blunders along with varying degrees of success and non-varying degrees of mayhem, then ends up capturing her man. but I'm still hooked and often trawl Amazon to see if there will be another instalment in this fabulous collection, and if so when it will be published. When I first started reading Janet Evanovich's bounty hunter series, I never imagined there would be 12 books' worth of entertainment to be derived from the series. Summary: Episode twelve of the Stephanie Plum, Bounty Hunter series sees new characters and a lot of old favourites.

Twelve sharp