The Diva Cooks a Goose

If you love Abbott and Costello’s who’s on first skit then you will love this book, for the rest of us, keeping straight who is dead, who is married to whom, which kids belong in which families and who is dating who gets a bit difficult to keep straight. My best advice is to take notes.

Besides the character confusion, the plot is interesting, taking place during the Christmas holiday season, when the home organizer extraordinaire is found dead after a music box releases a combination of deadly gasses. But was she the intended victim – with all the re-gifting going on, it is hard to tell. Inhaling toxic fumes is a unique form of murder for a cozy, so since it is not your typical form of murder the “who could have done it” list should be short. Well, not so with this group. Apparently, there are many that didn’t like the local clutter buster and with the shenanigans that she pulled at the Christmas dinner, the tangled web of Old Town, Alexandria gets a bit more jumbled.

Krista Davis pulls in the usual cast of characters from her previous books and adds more than a few additional cohorts. For a cozy, I am not sure why it had to be so complicated, but I do not know that she could have left anyone out since each person holds a bit of a clue as to the victim’s death.

I love how Ms Davis dangles the end of each chapter. Just when you think that you will close up the book for the night, she zings you with an end of chapter paragraph that makes you want to read just one more, which then turns into one more and one more.

Somewhere midway through this book you figure out who the murderer is. The signs are all there and the process of elimination does send you in other directions to begin with, but in the end, if you go with your gut feeling you will be right.

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"The picture of Mars’s Aunt Fay that hung near the fireplace swung to a slant. There were those, namely Mars’s mother, June, who thought her sister’s spirit resided in my kitchen.”

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I do enjoy this series, I just wish she would delve into the apparently haunted picture of Aunt Fey and how June talks to her. Maybe I just like a little supernatural with my cozies. I will definitely continue on with this series. Next time I just might need to add annotations, but sometimes a book demands a bit of interactive reading.