Janet Evanovich

Janet Evanovich (born 1943) is an American novelist best known for the comic crime series about Stephanie Plum, a New Jersey bounty hunter, which began with One for the Money in 1994.

She was born Janet Schneider on 22 April 1943 in South River, New Jersey. She began with category romance: Hero at Large appeared in 1987 under the pseudonym Steffie Hall, and she then wrote romances under her own name for Bantam's Loveswept line for about five years. She then turned to crime fiction with One for the Money, published in the United States in August 1994 and in Britain in 1995. It won the Dilys Award and the Crime Writers' Association New Blood Dagger in 1995, and was shortlisted or nominated for the Edgar, Anthony, Macavity and Agatha first-novel awards.

The Plum series has continued with numbered titles such as Two for the Dough (1996), Three to Get Deadly (1997), Four to Score (1998) and Hot Six (2000), and runs to more than thirty books. Her later Plum novels regularly opened at number one on the New York Times list, and her books have more than 200 million copies in print in over 40 languages. A film of One for the Money starring Katherine Heigl was released in January 2012.

For collectors. The key title is the 1994 first edition of One for the Money. Open Library records the New York first edition (ISBN 0-684-19639-5) under Scribner, although Wikipedia's infobox names St. Martin's Press. Compare the copyright page and ISBN with these details before buying.