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Stephanie looks forward to bringing Morelli in, but she’s completely unprepared to do so having never really engaged in the types of activities bounty hunters often find themselves getting into. She enlists the help of various people, including a far more experienced bounty hunter who works for Vinnie.

As things progress, we find out that the crime Morelli is due to stand trial for is a bit more complicated than it looks on the surface. There are other parties involved including a champion boxer who likes to terrorize and rape women. In the hunt for Morelli, Plum runs into the boxer. It turns out that Morelli is trying to protect Plum from the boxer and things get complicated from there.

Evanovich does a good job of pacing a novel that never quite has the time to get boring. The author also does a pretty good job of keeping Plum interesting and sympathetic throughout the novel even as she gets in over her head and makes some stupid mistakes here and there. The charm is supposed to be that she’s the direct opposite of the standard action hero, but being an attractive woman who is pegged on a couple of different occasions as being sexually desirable, she’s got the single most important feature of any pop female action hero. As long as your action heroine is attractive, she’s more or less fitting the mold of an action hero. Everything else is just details. As a result, the Evanovich’s focus on Plum’s relative inexperience in what she’s engaging in seems kind of self-conscious and irrelevant. Yes, a good portion of her charm is the fact that she’s in over her head, but it’s hardly new to this type of story.

Even the impoverished nature of the character has a precedent that goes back to the hardboiled gumshoes found in the work of authors like Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler. As good a novel as is it is, there really isn’t any innovation here on any level. It’s all competently delivered pop fiction that turns out to have become quite successful. So it’s perfect for Hollywood. But how good a job did they do of capturing what made the book so appealing to so many readers?

The Movie

By now the story has already been told and I‘m just delivering the next eulogy - the film was never screened for critics. It ended up getting a 3% on Rotten Tomatoes. A movie with a modest $43 million production budget has only had an opening weekend of $13 million. This one’s not going anywhere. Stephanie Plum is not destined to be the next big action hero. So what went wrong?

First of all - the novel itself was patterned so heavily on action movies that to make a film based on it feels a bit like a remake. And at the hands of a particularly uninspired director and an equally uninspired trio of credited screenwriters, it feels like a really weak retread of a Hollywood action film that never made it off the page of the paperback. Quite often it’s the problem that a book doesn’t fit the formula of a Hollywood film so it feels awkward onscreen. This one feels that way onscreen because the book fit the formula WAY too closely. Hollywood producers take note… the Hollywood blockbuster novel has no reason to go to the big screen. It’s already a movie - it just never got produced. Please let us keep novels like Jennifer Government. There’s no use putting it through the motions of doing a remake of a film that’s already been made even if it’s never been produced. (I sincerely hope that sentence made some kind of sense.)

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