TRENTON, N.J. - Cheery bounty hunter Stephanie Plum is a Jersey girl through and through: a gutsy, Spandex-wearing, pizza-loving chiclet armed with mace and mascara who understands the power of prayer - as in, "Holy Mary, mother of God ... please don't let me die on Route 1 with my hair looking like this."

Stephanie, 30 and single, hails from Trenton. She grew up in a close-knit, blue-collar, Italian-Hungarian family in Chambersburg, nicknamed the Burg.

She enjoys tucking into Mom's perfectly seasoned pot roast, canoodling with handsome Trenton cop Joe Morelli, and attending viewings with Grandma Mazur, who visits funeral parlors for the free cookies and chance to meet elderly stud muffins.

These diversions never interfere with Stephanie's main mission, snapping handcuffs on such notorious Trenton bail-skippers as Eddie DeChooch and Sandy Claws - when she's not searching for bodies in the Pine Barrens or stalking gangsters at the Shore.

"I like Stephanie; she's a tough cookie," said Trenton Mayor Douglas H. Palmer. "She's helped our local economy and put us on the map in a lot of ways. We all love her. We hope she never moves."

That won't happen anytime soon. Stephanie, the big-haired bail enforcer, star of eight best-selling crime novels by Janet Evanovich, is guaranteed life through at least three more books under Evanovich's contract with St. Martin's Press.

After that, Evanovich said, the series will continue "as long as I'm having fun writing it."

This can only be good for Trenton.

Since 1994, when she hit town in tight jeans and blue eye shadow in One for the Money, Stephanie Plum has brought much-needed glitz to New Jersey's state capital, a fading industrial city crammed with government bureaucrats who head for the suburbs come sundown.

Today, tourists come seeking Stephanie's haunts. A reading last summer at the Trenton Marriott drew 3,000 Plum Crazies, as fans are known - twice the expected crowd. People lined up for five hours for Evanovich's autograph.

"The books have sparked an interest in Trenton as a whole," said Police Lt. Joe Juniak, 42. "And there are people all over the world who now think Trenton cops are sexy."

Juniak has cameos in every Plum crime book; Evanovich even promoted him to police chief and, in Hard Eight, to mayor. (Mayor Palmer was not offended, but he did ask Evanovich to make him governor.)

Evanovich, a Jersey native who now lives in New Hampshire, met Juniak while doing research at Trenton police headquarters. She calls him "my good luck charm." Who knows what title he'll have when the series resumes next year with To the Nines.

In the meantime, there's a new Plum book, a Christmas novella called Visions of Sugar Plums, just out. Not part of the series, it's a fable with a familiar cast, including Stephanie's plus-size sidekick, Lula, and pet hamster, Rex.

Stephanie's still storing her gun, a .38 five-shot Smith & Wesson, in the cookie jar, and rooting for her favorite hockey team, the Trenton Titans.

"I put a lot of myself in Stephanie," said Evanovich, 59, who is breezy, funny and down to earth, like her fictional alter ego. "Stephanie's younger and slimmer and braver, but we think alike."

The daughter of a mechanic and a homemaker, Evanovich grew up in South River, a working-class suburb in central New Jersey. She discovered the charms of Trenton later in life, but developed her powers of observation early.

As a girl, she watched her Aunt Lena depart with friends for a night at the funeral parlor, there being little else in the way of recreation in South River.

"It was something to do. You got to dress up and meet new people. Cookies were served. And later you could sit around and talk about what kind of tie the deceased was wearing," Evanovich said. Years later she would draw on Aunt Lena and her grandmother to create Grandma Mazur.

After a brief stint as a photojournalist, Evanovich married her husband, Pete, and moved around a lot as a Navy wife. She had a son and a daughter, settled in Virginia, and raised many pets, including hamsters, which usually have a life span of two years, meaning Rex must be immortal.

As for Stephanie, for however many titles to come, she will belong to Trenton. "She's never going to age," Evanovich promises. "And that hamster will never die."