PI Kitty to the rescue

kw: book reviews, animal fiction, crime fiction, mysteries

I am definitely partial to cats. Several well-known mystery book series use cats as more than props. I've noticed titles starting with Cat in or Cat on, and a color in the title, and decided to give one a try. The opening chapter of Cat in a Topaz Tango by Carole Nelson Douglas, which is in the voice of Midnight Louie, promised something a bit different.

Different in a number of ways. Much of said chapter recounts recent events in the lives of the dozen or so principals in and around this book. This pegged it as a soap opera in progress, with a handful of parallel stories more-or-less intertwined, and at most one or two reaching any conclusion in this volume. And so it proved.

But I am not one to recount plots. The author is able to make a reader care about the characters, a trait I honor by not giving much away. The central story thread is a contest titled Dancing with the Celebs, and the levels of show-must-go-on-despite-mayhem silliness know no bounds. Eight adult contestants (half-n-half male-female), and four teen girl contestants paired with members of a boy band, compete in Dancing with the Stars style, but mainly for charity. The twist here is that to vote for a dancer, an audience member must call in and donate $20 to a lost children's charity. The action mainly takes place at a hotel in Las Vegas.

Amidst all this, the central character (Louie) and his human, miss Temple Barr, go undercover with a police lieutenant and a private security officer for the hotel (who has a past with the lieutenant, being the father of her 13-year-old daughter), to catch a stalker known as the Barbie Killer. So far only dolls have met their demise, but in gruesome ways. Ms Barr wears a teen idol persona she has cultivated in prior novels and the police reps masquerade as her agents.

The contest is marred by seeming accidents that are soon seen to be sabotage and other dirty tricks. The main perpetrator (not the only one) is found to have a deep grudge against one of the dancers. Others have more complex motives.

Every three or four chapters, a chapter in a different typeface gives us events from Louie's viewpoint (closer to the ground). He and a casino cat named Topaz, who is a pretty good sidekick for this caper, have a definite paw in solving the various mysteries that present themselves, and snagging (pun intended) the perpetrator. If a cat could think at a human level, I suppose he would sound like Louie.

About as frequently, we are whisked to Zurich to keep up with the progress of a formerly major character, one Max Kinsella, stage magician and secret anti-terror agent. Throughout this book he is amnesiac after barely surviving an attempt on his life, and only slowly recovering (though well enough to bed his psychiatrist). And that brings in another thread. There is a ton of sexual tension and innuendo throughout. It seems to be expected of mystery writing, though a few writers do quite well without it.

By the end of this volume, there are a couple of happy endings, a distinctly more confining ending for a certain perpetrator, and several loose ends for the author to weave into the next in the series. This is #21, but the author is yet young.