One for the Money

One for the Money was published in 1994 and was Janet Evanovich's first novel about Stephanie Plum. It appeared in the United States in 1994 and in Britain the following year, and it began a series that now runs to more than twenty-five novels and a set of novellas. The character's job is the engine: a bounty hunter who is not good at violence, works on commission and lives in a city where everyone knows her family.

The novel is a comic crime story with a death in it. Evanovich writes Trenton as a place of diners, bail offices, funeral parlours and relatives, and Stephanie's investigations are conducted largely by knocking on doors and asking the wrong questions, which gets her into trouble in a way that is played for both laughs and real danger. Joe Morelli, the fugitive, is established as the romantic complication that runs through the series, and the book's structure, one case with a deadline and a cast of recurring relatives, is the template the later volumes follow.

The series became a fixture of the bestseller lists, and this first book spent seventy-five consecutive weeks on the New York Times paperback list. A film adaptation followed in 2012. Evanovich had written romances under another name before this, and the switch to crime is visible in how much of the book is about the relationships. The mystery itself is straightforward, and the pleasure is in the company: the family, the neighbours and the diner regulars are drawn with affection and reused in every later volume.