Estimated read time: 2-3 minutes
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Husbands of the world, be warned. While you are at work, ogling the latest midriff-baring intern in the advertising department, your wife, the mother of your children, is likewise drinking in the hunky barista at your local coffee shop as if he were a tall, iced decaf mocha latte.
If this comes as a shock to you, you may find The Secret Diaries of a Soccer Mom equally eye-opening. But even the most casual mystery reader will spot the culprit in this Desperate Housewives-lite murder mystery.
For humor, Robyn Harding (who also wrote The Journal of Mortifying Moments) relies on the humbling moments of her hapless heroine, Paige Atwell, a stay-at-home mom who is frustrated by a work-distracted hubby, trying pre-teen daughter and potty-mouthed son.
Some of Paige's pitfalls are funny, but at a certain point you wonder why female authors have to humiliate their heroines to get readers to relate. But that's a topic for another book.
Paige's coffee klatch is stunned by the death of their married pal Karen, who confessed to Paige shortly before her fatal fall that she was sharing more than coffee with the aforementioned barista. While her pals comfort the widower and start a memorial fund in Karen's honor, grief-stricken Paige turns gumshoe.
With too much time on her hands and too many missed sexual connections with her husband, Paige turns amateur detective, donning a water bra and spike heels to lure her prime suspect, the barista, Javier, into a confession -- or a clinch.
Needless to say, Miss Marple never had to go there.
Soccer Mom has some amusing moments, but the whodunit factor is hooey. Nancy Drew would have cracked this case by the second chapter, bra or no bra.
The Secret Diaries of a Soccer Mom
By Robyn Harding
Ballantine, 285 pp., $21.95
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