I hadn’t planned on reading the next one so soon. I have so many other books to read, you have no idea. Along with the Borders frenzy (frenzies, really) which yielded at least twenty titles, I have a brown paper grocery bag filled with books nabbed from the library book sale. Probably another twenty in there. Then there’s the books I review for a friend’s blog, albeit most of those are ebooks now, packed into my iphone.

And then my co-worker, she who is responsible for me even reading these books in the first place, brought me book 4, 5 and 6. She apologized for not having book three.

I am way too OCD to skip one, so I had to immediately order book three from Amazon, and it went to the top of my list.

Reading two of these books closely together means you can basically skip the beginning few pages. It’s much like on American Idol when Ryan Seacrest teases some big reveal to happen “After. *dramatic pause* The Break.” And then, three minutes later, he comes back and takes five minutes to recap what happened three minutes ago, finally delivering the news that so-and-so made it to the Hollywood round.

Anyway, Evanovich catches her readers up in much the same way. Re-explaining who characters are in relation to each other, perhaps referencing the end of the book before. Once that’s over with, the action of book three begins.

Now that I have three of these under my belt, I can tell you that it seems like they are all following the same formula: Stephanie gets assigned a bail jumper to round up, and it ends up all going to shit very quickly. She is shot at multiple times, uncovers some huge greater controversy, and her pseudo boyfriend Joe Morelli saves her ass time and again. This book focused more on fellow bounty hunter, Ranger, who should probably be played by Samuel L. Jackson. I know they just made a movie of book one and I have no idea who played Ranger, because I refuse to see it on the grounds that Katherine Heigl plays Stephanie, which is just wrong.

Lula, a former prostitute turned bail bond office worker turned Stephanie’s sidekick, also plays prominently in this story.

It’s the same kind of funny, fast-moving page turner as the other two. I suspect this franchise will continue to deliver the same kind of action. Evanovich hasn’t made 18 of these for nothing. And there’s a reason they continue to sell.

Although I never thought I’d read this series, I’m glad my co-worker turned me on to it. I need a break every once in a while from the heavy literature I tend to get caught up in.