Review by Jessica Lesinski
Misty Divine’s drag mother, Lady Lady, is murdered with a poisoned chocolate. Now Misty and her alter ego, Joe, must solve the mystery before the cops put her/they behind bars for the crime! Was it the co-owner of the club? One of her fellow drag performers? Will her skills developed almost entirely from watching enough Criminal Minds to kill a horse be enough to get her/they out of this jam?
Ok, so I really liked this book. I’ll be honest, it’s pretty standard cozy mystery fare. Did you like Murder, She Wrote? Do you also like RuPaul’s Drag Race? First of all, let’s be friends, but second of all, you’ll like this book. It’s a little clunky and definitely has a first-book-by-an-author kind of feel, but everybody’s gotta start somewhere and I think this is great for a first time author. I really liked the character of Misty. I felt that she was fun to get to know and would honestly miss her when she turns back into Joe. I don’t feel bad saying that, either, because Joe would almost certainly agree as they expressed the desire to turn into Misty more than once throughout the book. I felt that I would have liked to get to know Lady Lady’s character a little bit more before she passed, as you only see her briefly before she is snuffed out and therefore feels more like a plot device than an actual character that we’re supposed to miss. I also thought that the constant misgendering of both Lady Lady and Misty by the police was very upsetting, even if totally accurate. I am not someone who deals with regular misgendering, but every time I saw it on the pages of this book, it gave me a little twinge of my insides that I did not care for, so I could see that someone who does regularly deal with being misgendered might not care for those parts.
That being said, I found this novel funny and engaging. I thought that the other drag queens were a hoot (side note that maybe someone could answer for me: The hell kind of name is ‘Plimberley’?) and that the story was overall pleasant. I’d give this book a 5/5 and would recommend it to any cozy mystery lover as well as Matthew Gray Gubler himself, and not just for the sheer number of times his name is mentioned. I would personally love to read more if this becomes a series.
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