Really, at this point, if you haven’t read any other books in Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum series, then what are you doing here? You cannot seriously expect to be able to pick up a series at number sixteen (plus a few “in between” novellas) and be able to grasp all of what’s happening.

In Sizzling Sixteen, Stephanie joins forces with Connie and Lula to save their boss, Vinnie. Vinnie is Stephanie’s cousin as well as her employer. He owns Vincent Plum Bail Bonds, where she works. Connie is the office manager, and Lula is the file clerk. Actually, out of all of them, Connie is the one who keeps the place running. Vinnie disappears after running up a sizable gambling debt with a local loan shark. It’s up to them to save Vinnie and their jobs. Along the way, there are a lot of laughs and implausible situations, as well as sexual tension between Stephanie and Ranger and Stephanie and Joe Morelli.

Oh, and there’s the lucky bottle Stephanie inherited from her Uncle Pip.

For me, the Stephanie Plum series is an escape. It’s not serious and doesn’t want to be taken seriously. It seems as the series goes on, the story gets more wacky and unrealistic, and yet, I couldn’t help laughing at it. Evanovich creates situations where everyone involved should know better, but they go ahead and make a mess of it anyway. At one point, they manage to rescue Vinnie from the kidnappers, then have to stash him somewhere. This is a series of misadventures involving the usual characters. However, it was the sequence with Moondog and the Hobbit convention that sent me rolling. In the middle of it all, Stephanie manages to make a mess of her bond enforcement assignments as usual.

There’s no real mystery here, except how Stephanie and company will manage to save Vinnie. It was fun watching it unfold. Vinnie is a sleaze who gets the fear of God put into him this go-round. Think he will change his ways? Where would the fun be in that?

Lorelei King does a fantastic job narrating this book. She works with some different voices for the different characters, but I give her credit for not trying too hard. The way she read it, I found to be very fun to listen to. It’s unfortunate that I had seen the movie One for the Money before listening to this, because I felt like I was listening to Katherine Heigl reading the book (this audiobook came out before that movie adaptation, so it wasn’t intentional). It did feel like her voice fit the characters, though.

When the world gets to be too much, I know I can get a dose of humor from Janet Evanovich. Sizzling Sixteen was definitely the antidote I needed from too much real life. It’s fun for what it is, which is escapism. If you try to take it seriously, you’ll only end up nitpicking how much is unrealistic, and where’s the fun in that?

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