Sex, Murder and a Double Latte by Kyra Davis
Sex, Murder and a Double Latte
Kyra Davis
ISBN: 0-373-89519-4
2005
If you can get past the cutesy title and pink book cover, it’s not a bad read.
Sophie Katz is our heroine: a wise-cracking mystery writer turned victim when scenes from her novels curiously start to mirror her own life. Sure, happens all the time to those hapless mystery writers. When will they learn? Someone would have to have some healthy suspension of disbelief to actually buy the premise, but if that’s you, then by all means keep reading.
This is the kind of book that requires little investment in terms of brainpower; it’s something that would make waiting for a doctor’s appointment bearable. The pace is zippy and there are a few good lines, but on the whole the author tries a little too hard to be funny. And innovative. Each chapter begins with a quote from one of the heroine’s fictitious books that added nothing to it and were fairly pointless, but that kind of thing seems to be in vogue now, so can we really judge?
If you like to solve mysteries as you read, you may be disappointed because for the first three-quarters of this story there is no real motive for anything. It’s little details like this that turned me off. Only at the end do we find out in Scooby-Doo fashion why things happened the way they did. Okay, not ground-breaking work, but there’s plenty of banter and self-deprecating humor to while away the hours. If you’re looking to be passively engaged, this is your book.