Review

The holidays are a busy time of year for Sophie Winston; she’s got a house to decorate, cookies to bake, presents to buy, and then there’s the small matter of the Christmas party she agreed to plan for real estate agent Horace Scroggins and his clients. When Horace takes a near-fatal fall during the event, though, and it’s revealed that someone tried to poison him, Sophie’s domestic diva duties are relegated to the back burner. Who on earth would target someone as sweet and kind as Horace – and why? That’s a question Sophie becomes even more desperate to answer when one of Horace’s clients is nearly electrocuted while hanging up lights and another is found dead and wrapped like a Christmas present. Can Sophie catch the killer before he or she can strike again, or will her sleuthing earn her a spot at the top of a homicidal maniac’s hit list?

The Diva Wraps It Up is the eighth of Krista Davis’ Domestic Diva Mysteries. I flat-out adored 2011’s The Diva Haunts the House and 2012’s The Diva Digs Up the Dirt, so I had extremely high hopes for Davis’ latest release; unfortunately, though, The Diva Wraps It Up proved a major disappointment.

Everything about this tale, from its plot to its mystery to its cast, feels hastily sketched. The series characters Davis’ readers have come to know and love are all there, but none of them exhibit any of their usual depth or nuance, and the book-specific characters all feel generic and lifeless, as well. The pace is glacial, with no real action, tension, or drama to speak of. The setup takes entirely too long. Far too much of Davis’ prose is dedicated to describing Sophie’s attire (how many pairs of elastic-waist pants can one woman own?) and the endless supply of holiday-themed beverages and comestibles that come from her kitchen (this may explain the elastic-waist pants…). Both investigations (the one conducted by the police and the one conducted by Sophie) feel amateurish and haphazard. And while I love the scene in which Sophie discovers the gift-wrapped corpse, the explanation for how said corpse came be gift-wrapped is unsatisfying, convoluted, and ridiculous. In fact, I’d go so far as to characterize the entire second half of The Diva Wraps It Up in the same way. Davis incorporates far too many silly twists and outrageous turns to compensate for the fact that nothing of substance actually happens in this book. Add to all that the fact that I think Berkley Prime Crime made a huge mistake releasing a Christmas-themed mystery in June – just a few weeks after most of the country managed to escape from one of the coldest, snowiest winters on record – and you have a book I rather wished I’d skipped. The Diva Wraps It Up isn’t bad enough to make me remove Krista Davis from my reading list, but it’ll almost certainly cause me to place Davis’ next Domestic Diva Mystery near the bottom of my TBR pile.

Reviewed by Kat