A woman working at her father's record store in Harlem in the late 1950s meets an aspiring saxophone player.

After losing her job, Jersey girl Stephanie Plum is broke. Needing a job she is told that her cousin, a bail bondsman, needs someone to help out in the office. But the only job openings he has are for skip tracers. She learns that Joe Morelli, a guy she knew intimately years ago, is one of the "skips". She eventually finds him but wasn't really prepared so he gets away. Another bounty hunter, Ranger, tries to teach her. Eventually she finds Morelli again, but he claims he is innocent of the...