Since I seem to be on a spider theme with The Story of Charlotte's Web, I chose The Black Widow Agency by Felicia Donovan from my stack of mysteries brought home from the library yesterday.
The agency is run by Katie, an ex-cop; Alexandria, the resident computer geek with her pet tarantula, Divinity; Margo, the African American gourmet cook who whips up chocolate black widow spiders for snacking; and, Jane, a somewhat dowdy woman of a certain age that handles the account books.
All of them have somehow been scorned by a man. Katie's husband was having an affair and when she found out she got drunk and went to an undercover drug bust totally hungover and ended up getting shot and fired from the police force. Her ex-husband has recently been promoted to captain.
Alexandria got set up in some sort of cyber-fraud by an ex-lover. I can't remember what happened to the other two, but it wasn't pretty.
So they band together to take on female clients who are being cheated on or have been in some way harmed or abused or mistreated by a man. In this case, a woman whose husband sets her up and she gets arrested for using drugs. Of course she is innocent, but she loses her job and her daughter.
There are an awful lot of tasteless jokes, the writing is a bit choppy (OK, this is her first book), and way too many descriptions of that tarantula crawling up legs and across tables. Eeeww.
But I am gonna hang in there. It is a quick read; I finished half of it last night. There is a sequel as well, so the Black Widows must be doing a good job.
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