Going Rogue: Rise and Shine Twenty-Nine (stephanie Plum, #29)

The 29th installment in Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum series opens on a Monday morning in Trenton, New Jersey, when bail bonds enforcement agent Stephanie Plum arrives at the Vincent Plum Bail Bonds office to find it locked and dark. Connie Rosolli, the office manager, has not arrived. Lula, a former sex worker who now works loosely for the agency, joins Stephanie in trying to locate Connie. Stephanie learns from Connie's widowed mother that Connie left home early to buy gas and lottery tickets. She traces Connie's route and confirms Connie visited the gas station and a bakery, but no one saw her afterward, and the doughnuts she bought never arrived. After Stephanie's cousin Vinnie, the bail bondsman, directs her to a spare key, she and Lula enter through the back door and discover the storeroom has been ransacked.

Lula takes over the desk and finds three new failure-to-appear (FTA) notices: Carpenter Beedle, a former accountant who botched an armored car robbery; Brad Winter, a blackmailer who secretly videotaped married women; and Bellissima "Bella" Morelli, grandmother of Stephanie's boyfriend, Trenton police detective Joe Morelli. Bella was arrested for arson, resisting arrest, and assaulting an officer. She is feared in the neighborhood for her supposed ability to curse people using "the eye," a Sicilian folk practice. Stephanie visits her parents' home in the Burg, the tight-knit neighborhood where she grew up, to gather intelligence from her Grandma Mazur, who insists on riding along as Stephanie's partner with an unauthorized .45-caliber pistol in her purse.

Meanwhile, an unidentified man calls the office claiming Vinnie has something that belongs to him and that he is keeping something of Vinnie's until he gets it back. Stephanie connects the call to the ransacked storeroom and Connie's disappearance, suspecting the caller kidnapped Connie as leverage. The next morning, she inventories the storeroom and finds one item missing: a coin left as bail security by Paul Mori, a local dry cleaner. Lula reports that Mori has turned up dead, shot 12 times. Vinnie explains that Mori gave him a Knights Templar coin from a board game called The Treasure of Gowa. After being bonded out, Mori returned demanding the coin back and became violent until Connie stun gunned him. Two men then forced Mori into a car. The coin, Vinnie admits, somehow got lost.

The kidnapper calls the office, confirms he has Connie, and demands the coin within 24 hours, warning of "pain and death" and forbidding Stephanie from contacting police. Stephanie deduces that Beedle, a known pickpocket present when the coin disappeared, likely stole it. Lula writes an unauthorized bond to spring Beedle from jail. He admits he sold the coin to Benji Crup at a comic book store, who sold it to Melvin Sparks, a collector. Sparks refuses to cooperate.

Stephanie calls Ranger, the owner of Rangeman Security and her former mentor. Their relationship is complicated: Stephanie loves both Ranger and Morelli in different ways, with Morelli representing comfort and normalcy while Ranger remains exciting and elusive. That night, Ranger breaks into Sparks's cluttered apartment, where they find six Knights Templar coins but cannot identify which one the kidnapper wants. Ranger decides to offer all six, and Stephanie tapes a sign reading "I've got it" in the office window.

At the exchange, the kidnapper uses a drone to inspect the coins and declares none is correct; his coin has a small notch on the edge. He briefly shows Stephanie a FaceTime video of Connie tied to a chair, gagged and blindfolded, then extends the deadline by 24 hours. Stephanie discovers all three men connected to the coin have simultaneously vanished.

Grandma suggests Benji might be attending GoComic, a comic convention in Atlantic City. Stephanie, Lula, and Grandma make the trip and locate all three men in a hotel suite. Beedle explains that Sparks found tiny numbers and letters on the coin under magnification, which turned out to be a cryptocurrency password. Beedle accessed the account and found 11 million dollars. Believing the cryptocurrency was abandoned, the three divided it and spent it. The account is now empty. Beedle hands over the original notched coin. None of the three knew about the kidnapping or Mori's murder. Unable to see any good coming from reporting them, Stephanie lets them go.

Morelli suggests giving the kidnappers the coin and letting them discover the money is gone, with Ranger positioned to neutralize them. Stephanie sends the kidnapper a photo of the notched coin. He indicates he has what he needs from the image and no longer requires the physical coin. The kidnappers release Connie at a cemetery gate, where Stephanie finds her disoriented but alive. Connie recounts her ordeal: She was stun gunned from behind, held in a dark windowless room, and burned on her arm during interrogation.

Within hours, the kidnapper calls back, furious the account is empty, and threatens Stephanie. Over the weekend, the kidnappers escalate by abducting Vinnie. A photo arrives showing him duct-taped and hanging from a meat hook. A second photo shows bloody fingers with missing fingernails. Bella causes additional chaos by attempting to fly to Italy without a passport and locking her babysitting sister-in-law in a cellar. Zane Walburg, a bomb maker Stephanie apprehends with Bella's help, retaliates by destroying Stephanie's car and then the bail bonds office. Lula acquires a retired school bus as a mobile office.

Ranger arranges firearms training for Stephanie with Tank, a Rangeman operative, who identifies her core problem: She closes her eyes when she fires. After a parking lot attack by a stocky man, Stephanie photographs his car and captures the license plate. Ranger traces it to Marcus Smulet, a 46-year-old trucker with a prior arrest for human trafficking whose brother Luther drove an eighteen-wheeler from El Paso to Trenton weeks earlier and never returned.

At Benji's grand opening for his new comic book store, masked men ambush Stephanie and Lula nearby. Both are stun gunned. Lula is locked in a car trunk; Stephanie is taken to a room inside an industrial building where she finds Vinnie chained to an eyebolt. His fingernails are intact, revealing the earlier photo was staged. The Smulet brothers no longer conceal their identities, a sign Stephanie reads as meaning they do not expect her to survive.

Stephanie frees herself using techniques Ranger taught her and escapes with Vinnie through the ventilation system, discovering a human trafficking operation: women sewing under armed guard, dormitory rooms, and trucks offloading people from Mexico. They arm themselves with a guard's weapons. When Stephanie returns for Lula, Luther catches her and forces her down a fire escape at gunpoint. Sparks, dressed as Sir Lancelot and having followed the Rangeman vehicles from Benji's store, appears below and disarms Luther with a sword maneuver that severs three of his fingers. Stephanie fires shots to summon help, then chases Marcus and subdues him until Ranger pulls her away.

Ranger's team secures the building, which contains both a trafficking ring and a drug operation. Lula is found alive. Ranger offers to deactivate the GPS tracking in a necklace he gave Stephanie but tells her she can reactivate it anytime, then walks away. Morelli arrives with Bella. Stephanie points out one of the guards and tells Bella he hates Sicilians, prompting Bella to put the eye on him. Morelli confirms their dinner date, and Stephanie affirms, "You betcha."