Avoiding the dreaded "doesn't have a man" syndrome

There have been six books in Sharon Short's "Stain-Busting Mysteries" featuring a laundromat owner named Josie Toadfern. They're quite readable, light mysteries, usually not obvious or annoying. I think she may be done with the series - nothing as obvious as Patricia Sprinkle's wrap-up of the "Thoroughly Southern" series, but a sort of valedictory feel to the latest one (Hung Out to Die).

Especially the big triple wedding in the epilogue.

See, Josie has two best friends, Cherry and Sally. And they're all 30 and unmarried when the book starts, and they have a huge triple wedding at the end. Now, I don't have anything against people getting married (I wish more could) and I don't have anything against huge showcase fancy triple weddings, either, if that's what folks want.

But.

Cherry's relationship with Dean stretches over at least three books - possibly four, I can't remember for sure. But it's a real relationship that actually features heavily in book five.

Josie meets Levi in book six, on page 15 - actually bumps into him in front of the rest rooms in the bar, which embarrasses her ridiculously for far too long (omg! he knows I pee!), finds out his name on page 35, has her first conversation with him on page 43 - all the while being all where-have-you-been-all-my-life over him - and then marries him 180 pages later. "Whirlwind" would be a good word for it.

And Sally? Well, in the accelerating run-up to the grand finale, Sally gets a man made up out of the whole cloth just to keep her from not having one at the end of the book. No kidding. Her entire romance is boiled down to one page in the middle of the epilogue - one page - and it's so obvious that it's just because Short doesn't want to wrap up the series with Sally such a sad, sad, pathetic failure.

I don't mind romance muscling in on the detecting. But an entire courtship crammed into a page just to "validate" a person by getting her married? Mlya, as the Russians and Ukrainians say. Bleah.