Kate Carlisle

The Twelve Books of Christmas is definitely not like the books at the beginning of the series, books I absolutely loved. Those were full of mystery, mayhem, complicated plots, and interesting twists and turns. This one is about beautiful and rich people who fly around the world at a moment's notice on a private plane, stay at fancy castles, do things on a whim, and maybe solve a mystery or two while they do all their other stuff in between. And everyone calls Derek ''commander", never investigating him or Brooklyn, simply because of who he was, even though he was right there when everything happened. Not the same at all as the earlier books.

First of all, Brooklyn's independent character was something I enjoyed, even if she was somewhat whiny throughout the books. I mean her life got upended numerous times because she happened to come across dead bodies and it was natural that she would become a suspect, so I enjoyed those interactions she had with police officers and other people as she tried to solve the mysteries. Now, she just has Derek make a phone call and everything is good as he "pulls his magic strings" and suddenly, everything is taken care of. This despite the fact that he was one of the most suspicious people at the beginning. I get they are married now and I get that he would support her, but I would like to see them be a bit more suspicious of those around them.

The plot itself was so thin you can't even see the wire in the trees. For the first two thirds of the book, there were a lot of discussions about the missing books and how they were related to each other, but honestly, not big mystery came out of them simply because there was little to no investigation. And I don't necessarily need a murder in these books, just a good mystery, but neither was actually interesting. Both just seemed thrown into a plot that was weak, at best. Motives didn't make sense, the behaviour of certain characters made no sense, plot points were 'developed' and then discarded for no reason that I could see, so overall it was just a big mess. And pages of descriptions of the food. Ugh!

Verdict
The Twelve Books of Christmas was my least favourite entry in this series, and I was so disappointed over the plot and character development as well as the ending. It was a mish-mash of stuff thrown together in order to give the author an excuse to send Brooklyn and Derek to Scotland over the holidays, one of the only things I liked about the book. Unfortunately, this series has been going downhill for a few books now. I will probably give it one last shot, but after that, if it doesn't go back to the magic of the earlier books, I may have to call it quits.… (more)