I have a confession to make: I love Stephanie Plum.

Now, I consider myself as manly as the next guy, but every now and then I find myself craving a heaping helping of my favorite chick lit heroine.

Stephanie Plum is the star of a wildly successful series of genre-bending novels by Janet Evanovich: three parts mystery to one part romance, with a generous dash of humor thrown in.

The books are set in Trenton, New Jersey, where Stephanie works as a bounty hunter, running down criminals who fail to show up for court.

Stephanie is a bit of a ditz with big hair, plenty of attitude and the grit and determination to get the job done. She is aided and abetted by her loyal sidekick Lula, a former streetwalker of ample proportions with a penchant for low-cut tops and Spandex miniskirts.

“If Lula was a pastry, she’d be a big chocolate cupcake with a lot of frosting,” Stephanie says in “Hardcore Twenty-Four,” the installment I’m currently reading. “I’d be more of a croissant with a ponytail.”

Frequently in peril, Stephanie always manages to come out all right with plenty of help from Lula, her pistol-packing Grandma Mazur, her comfort food-dispensing mother and the two men in her life, the Italian-American cop Joe Morelli and the mysterious Cuban-American security consultant Carlos Manoso, aka Ranger.

The books are great fun, with enough canoodling to satisfy romance novel fans and enough action that you won’t have to surrender your man card. And at age 79, Evanovich shows no signs of slowing down: She published her 29th Stephanie Plum novel in November.