Dating Can Be Murder: A Samantha Shaw Mystery (Samantha Shaw Mysteries)

Rating:
Summary: Revenge is Mayhem
Review: Samantha (Sam) Shaw - she of the PTA meetings and soccer supervision - cleans up after her recently demised husband Trent. In the trunk of his car she finds a cache of panties with adherent post-it notes ranking them. In belated revenge Sam sells her house and uses the proceeds to have her breasts brought up to popular standard, get a new and slinky wardrobe - and to buy Heart Mates, a seedy dating agency.

And now things start to progress. Husband Trent was a traveling salesman, dealing with condoms. That does not mean that he should sleep around. Sam hires Blaine, Trents car mechanic, to be her assistant. Grandpa Barney, a retired magician, handles all the computer work. Gabe Pulizzi, ex cop. helped her with a security system. Part of that system is Ali, oversized German Shepherd with a fondness for beer. The police contributes detective Rossi who can not get enough view of the thongs Sam has taken to wearing.

And then there are the bad guys. It seems that Trent has been dealing in drugs rather big time and started to skim the proceeds. The bad guys want their money back, and Sam is in serious trouble, not knowing anything about it all.

The story develops into a free for all, everybody against everybody else. But the thongs remain within view, and the bad guys get caught and punished.

Satisfying throughout.

Rating:
Summary: Has Potential
Review: This new series has potential. The problem with it is that the author is trying too hard to be Janet Evanovich and trying too hard to make Sam into Stephanie Plum...and moving too fast to make either work.

Stephanie's involvement as a bounty hunter makes some warped sense -- she's out of work, desperate, and forces herself upon her cousin in order to make what she believes will be fast money. Sam is a soccer mom who runs a dating service. While I can see her wanting to protect her boys, it didn't make much sense that she'd involve herself in the danger that went along with this case when she had so many people willing to help her. Also, it made no sense at all that this woman who's struggling so bad financially that she had to sell her house and her husband's vintage car and move in with her grandfather would use the money for a boob job and slut wardrobe, rather than putting it away to take care of these boys she's so concerned about.

The other problem is that Stephanie and her posse are characters we've gotten to know over time as the series has progressed, which has allowed us to feel for them and "pick a side" in the Joe/Stephanie/Ranger triangle. In this, the first book of the series, two men are vying for Sam and she ends up having sex with one of them. The whole thing just moves too fast without letting you get to know the characters, so it's hard to really care much about them or who Sam ends up with. And while it took three or four books for Stephanie's exploding cars to get old, it only took about 100 pages for Sam's ruining her clothes (and whining about it) to get old.

The author really does have the potential here for a fun series, but she needs to slow down and take her time, rather than trying to force nine installments of Stephanie Plum into one installment of Sam Shaw. Perhaps she could pick up Nancy Bartholomew's "Strip" series to see how it's done.

Rating:
Summary: Fun New Mystery Series
Review: When Samantha Shaw's no-good cheating husband dies, Samantha takes the insurance money, and does something useful with it. At least, useful in her terms. She buys an entirely new wardrobe, gets breast implants, and buys Heart Mates, the dating service that her deceased husband did business with. Everything is fine, until Samantha gets a disturbing note, and within a short time she finds out that her husband was doing business in an illegal drug trade, and there's a lot of money involved. Now she's juggling kids, a business, and trying to catch the thug who threatened her.

I picked this book up when I happened to stumble into the author, Jennifer Apodaca, when I was browsing at Barnes & Noble. Samantha is a fun new character, who is reminiscent of Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum. A great new female-empowering detective, who will capture the hearts of fans the world over.

Erika Sorocco