Plum Lucky is a 2008 novel by Janet Evanovich, one of America's most popular mystery writers. This is a short addition to her most successful series of novels, featuring bounty hunter Stephanie Plum. Unlike most of her Stephanie Plum novels, which have titles with numbers in them, this one does not have such a title, and appears to be a side story of sorts.
Janet Evanovich is wildly popular, and I have read fairly favorable reviews of her work. I have long intended to investigate what lay behind the popularity, but other works of literature have kept my intention. Finding this book at the Dollar Tree, and finding it rather short, I bought it and read it in several afternoons.
I didn't really like the book at the beginning. I found the characters and situations so unlikely that they couldn't gain my sympathy. The plot of the book involves Stephanie Plum's grandmother finding a canvas bag full of a million dollars, and going on a gambling expedition. Stephanie Plum has to track down her grandmother and make sure she doesn't get in trouble with a bag full of a million dollars---especially when she finds out that the million dollars that her grandmother "found" was taken from a small time crook who stole it from a mob boss. At first the plot and the character's reaction to it was so outlandish that I couldn't gain traction.
About halfway through, I figured out that this wasn't suspense, and it certainly wasn't crime noir. This is comedy of a slapstick variety, with detective and crime tropes as dressing. It was good that I made this discovery, because the novel became increasingly outlandish as I went on, with plot elements including: a man who thinks he is a leprechaun, a possibly-talking horse, and a mob boss who thinks that space aliens are out to get him. Even with guns firing, there is never much of a sense of danger or suspense. This is a form of chick lit, with the girls sassing off at the clueless men, only they are firing rocket launchers while doing it.
I don't know if this is representative of the rest of Janet Evanovich's work, and I don't know if she could be said to "deserve" to have sold fifty million books, but I can say that there are many less rewarding books to read than this.