The book was a nice pleasant read, and there was a bonus. I read ‘the end’ and thought it was over, the mystery had been solved and all, but it wasn’t all over yet. There’s more: there’s Cat Detective to the rescue :-D
I must say though that this was not a serious mystery novel, with serious detective work, just a couple of examples: Darcy gets involved because she has visions and nightmares she wants to stop and is always in the middle of things; the detective and Darcy find out that the second victim suspected that someone was stealing money from the city and apparently he was suspecting Aaron, so Jon goes and arrests Aaron, just like that! No questioning, no previous investigation into his accounts, nothing, they simply knock at his door (he's Darcy's brother-in-law and Jon's partner's husband) and as he opens the door he's handcuffed and arrested, and of course he had nothing to do with either stealing or murdering.
About the story:
Darcy is divorced, owns a bookshop and a cat. Her friend Linda works at the library and owns a female cat, Persephone, that’s gone missing.
Her sister Grace is a police officer married to Aaron. Her new partner Jon is apparently very very handsome. Darcy’s husband Jeff keeps bothering her about some photos of his that she kept from him, saying she stole them. Sue is the girl working in her bookshop.
Her friend Anna is one of the women attending her book club. She’s also the first victim.
Darcy investigates the murder, upset that all the people she knows are now to be considered suspects. Pete who dated Anna, says he was home with his sick brother Blake. Steve is the mayor, married to Helen who owns the only bar/bakery in town. Mark stutters when nervous, and works at the bank with Jess, envied by Sue because of all her expensive clothes and shoes.
Darcy’s dead great-aunt Millie keeps throwing on the floor Christie’s book And then there were none, the same book Darcy and the others had last read for the book club - Millie also keeps hitting Jon on the head for some reason not specified, but she eventually stopped and smiled at the two of them when they got together :-)
Darcy has dreams about a man killing Anna, and after she starts investigating with Jeff, he gets killed too. Jeff had been going into the town financial records, finding out that someone was stealing from the town. He suspected first Jon, then Aaron.
When Darcy realizes that the copy of ‘And then there were none’ that Helen is reading is the same copy Anna had, Jon takes Helen to the police station for questioning. Knowing that both her and her husband were there, Darcy sneaks into their house to investigate, and finds stuff that leads her to understand that Steve’s the killer. He comes home to find her there and threatens to kill her too, and was about to do it had not Jon burst in to save her, lead by Smudge who ran at her side :-)
Steve was having an affair with Jess, stealing money to shower her with gifts, and had killed Anna because she had found out about the affair and would have told his wife. Steve didn’t want to divorce her because she was the perfect wife for a mayor. Steve killed her with her own gun that she had taken when he had scared her, for defense..
Mystery solved, all Darcy has to do is following her cat to see what is he up to whenever he runs out with stuff in his mouth. She finds out that Persephone had kittens, and had also fallen into a hole she couldn’t come out of, or something like that. Anyway, Smudge had brought her food, and now the fire brigade takes her out of there and back to a happy Linda :-)
The only loose thread not addressed in the end , if one could call it that, concerns Jeff’s photos. He had told her that his mother wanted them because there was the only picture of his dead father that survived the fire that burned all the others. I think Darcy should have tried to find it and return it...
The last bit of the book is all about how Smudge managed to find Persephone :-)
He questioned Tony the Tiger, the stray cat eating outside Helen’s bar, and then went to Persephone’s house and talked to Onyx (who called him ‘revered’, saying he’s special ad he’s honored to meet him :D ), then to Mariel, Persephone’s cat neighbour who thought she was dead. He talked to Ernesto, Persephone’s boyfriend and other neighbour. Ernesto is Italian so of course in the writing there are a lot of ‘a’ between the words, I know about this, I guess that abroad they think the Sicilian accent is the universal Italian accent...
Ernesto tells him that a dog he calls Kujo has scared her away, chasing her. Kujo is no help at all, he just wants to bite him. Help comes from elsewhere, when Corvin the crow comes to Smudge saying ‘bad is coming’ and they witness Anna’s murder, and that’s why he was waiting for Darcy to come home to take her to Anna’s house.
Smudge follows Kujo around for a couple of days until the dog leads him to Persephone. Kujo’s a bad dog, happy to watch her starve to death with her kittens.
Smudge enlisted all his cat friends: his love Twistypaws and also: Tony, Rolo, Samson, Enzo, Paolo, Omar (wow, lots of Italians in this neighbourhood) and also Onyx, Mariel and Ernesto. They brought Persephone food and Smudge tried to help Darcy with her mystery so she’d had time to help him, and he did save her because he knew that Steve was the murderer; when she was saved and all was over, he finally got her to follow him and rescue Persephone and her kittens.
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