Awesome / Stephanie Plum

• Stephanie has at least one per book.
  • In One for the Money she fills Jimmy Alpha with bullets, having already taken one in the ass. Trapping Joe in the freezer truck and saving Lula, too, if you squint.
  • Beating the shit out of Kenny Mancuso in Two for the Dough, who's been established as a total sociopath.
  • The capture of Three to get Deadly's FTA. As of this book she begins to gain a reputation of a) finding dead bodies and b) having blown up the funeral home.
  • Getting in a knife fight with Sugar, the uber-possessive drag queen (who's not even the main threat in the novel). Keeping her calm against the actual main antagonist of Four to Score, an ex-Mob hitman who delights in, among other things, dismembering his victims. Also, she begins to actually get better at detective work (well, she could hardly get worse) and gets Joyce arrested.
  • Dealing with the most likely depressed villain of the week in High Five, which isn't half as good as how she takes out Briggs after he keeps pissing her off.
  • Setting the carpet car on fire (accidentally) in Hot Six.
  • Everything about Seven Up. She trades in a pig's heart for Grandma Mazur, Mooner and Dougie, all while going up against a now semi-retired generation of the Mob (including a schizophrenic who believes she is God's weapon on Earth). She outsmarts her and after that feels sorry for the way she's been treated over the years due to her condition.
  • Not completely breaking down under the pressure of being stalked by a war gamer threatening to rip out her heart in Hard Eight. Especially after the unfortunate incident with the rabbit in the bakery parking lot.
  • To The Nines features Steph standing her ground against the Webmaster/Clyde throughout the book, hunting down Singh, fighting off Fisher Cat and shooting Clyde during the climax.
• (Saint) Valerie, Steph's sister, gets her own in Hard Eight crashing in to the building Steph's being held in with a van and getting them both to safety, all whilst her hands are duct-taped together.
• Steph's mother runs over one of the main antagonists in Hard Eight. Simply because he was chasing her daughter. In Tricky Twenty-Two, she chases down a villain on foot and beats the hell out of him. He'd hit Stephanie with a van and briefly kidnapped her the day before.
• Ranger has several, such as being shot and not giving a damn.
• Sally Sweet's epic rescue of Stephanie at the climax of book 10. The street gang that was about to execute Stephanie may have been heavily armed, but they weren't expecting to be interrupted by a speeding school bus barreling straight at them.

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