DATING CAN BE MURDER

Here’s the recipe for postmarital bliss: smaller house, bigger tits, more jobs, scantier clothes. So when Samantha Shaw’s cheating hubby Trent checks out after a peanut-allergy attack, Sam uses his insurance for a boob job. She dyes her graying hair blond and crams her newly enhanced torso into a wardrobe of skintight sweaters and thigh-high skirts that barely cover her thong underwear. Then, since her part-time job reviewing romance novels can’t pay very much—in 16 chapters, she never once picks up a book—she uses the remainder of her widow’s mite to purchase Heart Mates Dating Service. This shrewd business move leaves her with no money to pay the mortgage, so she sells her house and moves with her sons, T.J. and Joel, into her grandfather’s three-bedroomer. Shortly afterward, all hell breaks loose: a man named Perry busts into her office and roughs her up, demanding that she tell him where her late husband stashed some drug money. She discovers a bunch of corpses, one of them desecrating her own front porch. Some of her frumpy ex-PTA buddies ask her to locate some missing home videos of themselves frolicking with their husbands. (Apparently, some soccer moms enjoy better conjugal relations than Sam did.) But the real action here centers right beneath Sam’s thong.

Apodaca ought to follow up her mystery debut with an actual romance novel. Then Sam could review it herself, and we’d all go home happy.