Milk and Cookies

When it comes to falling in love, Tammy Whinot will stop at nothing:

No matter that when she meets Mr. Perfect, he's shooting it out with a Chechen convenience store owner.

Or that five minutes later he takes a leap over a drunken Porsche into a coma and a stint in a wheelchair.

Or that the fixer-upper Tammy buys Mr. Perfect contains a family of ghosts trapped in an afterlife of murky tribulation.

Or that tribulato numero uno is the mobster Tony Ten Finger's obsession with recouping the $9.5 million Ghost Ted embezzled from him.

What a girl needs in this dating hell we live in are great instincts, and Tammy has some of the greatest:

She can see past Joe Lamb's haphazard suicidal tendencies to the pot of dull stability that lies beneath.

She can charm a family of irritated ghosts into defending her to the -- uh -- death against a swarm of gangsters.

She can spot the rose in a patch of weeds, the courage in a frightened coward, the hope in a broken bicycle, and the love in a mistreated child.

If the finest quality of an American hero is an absolute faith in humanity, then Tammy makes the grade with powers to spare.

Don't misunderstand her -- sooner or later everybody does something bad -- Tammy herself isn't above a little kidnapping, blackmail, and grand larceny -- but the trick in love and life is to find someone who does bad things badly and ugly things worst of all.