My second work by this author and second in this series.

The continuing adventures of police cats. Told from their point of view. On the one hand, the personalities, interactions, and the like of the cats is good, solid. On the other hand, the interactions and dialogue of the humans is kind of painful to read. I’m not exactly sure what happened there, but that’s something of a continuing theme from the first story in the series.

There are two or three story-lines, depending on if ‘you’ want to break out the interactions between Nat and Willow (the police cats) as a separate thread. On one level, you have the story of a murder investigation. Mostly involving the cats being on scene when the human detectives interview various suspects, and also involving the cats wandering around on their own to investigate. This murder investigation involves a print shop owner found dead beneath a box pile of wedding invitations near an open and robbed safe. Suspects include that print shop owners former business partner (I think her name was Beatrice), the employee who found the dead guy (John), the son of the dead guy (Steuben), and any possible robbers. The second story-line involves a cat fight. Heh. Right, involves a fight between two different alleys in the city, the Thorndale cat gang and the Stevenson cat gang.

The mystery, as a mystery, isn’t much. It’s neat, though to follow the cats around, and see how they try to get the humans to realize what’s going on. The interactions between the cats were also well done – the interactions between the alley cats, the police cats, and various cat bystanders.

This is another work that is probably closer to something like 3.75, but is rounded up to 4 stars as that seems reasonable as to where to put a 3.75 work on the scale given to use.

December 17 2015 ( )