cat mysteries

Review: As Dark As My Fur

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Even though the saying goes “you can’t always judge a book by its cover,” this actually doesn’t always apply with book covers. However, in the case of As Dark As My Fur, the second book in Clea Simon’s Blackie and Care Cat Mystery series, the cover accurately reflects the book’s feel and tone.

Written in the voice of Blackie, a black cat with a mysterious past, set in an unnamed city with a post-apocalyptic feel, this series combines elements of fantasy and mystery. In As Dark As My Fur, Simon continues the adventures of Blackie and  teenager Care, an apprentice private detective. Continue Reading

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A Cat of a Different Color: When a Cat Writer Goes Dark

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Written by Clea Simon

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Sometimes a writer needs to go dark. Not as in silent, but as in dangerous. After close to 20 cozies, I realized that’s what I had to do. The cover of my new mystery, As Dark As My Fur, says it all: a black cat stares out, his green-eyed gaze intense. In the background, a tunnel seems to lead the way underground, further from the light. Indeed, this book – the second Blackie and Care mystery – follows a path laid out in the first of this series, The Ninth Life. And while I understand that not all of my readers will want to follow me here, I do hope you’ll listen as I explain why I’m taking it now, in this series.Continue Reading

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It’s Kitty O’Clock Somewhere!

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Written by Clea Simon

Cats understand book time.

You know how felines are – the way they’ll rush around madly, only to suddenly plop down for an hours-long nap. Their insistence that they are starving and must be fed immediately, only to be sated a few licks, finishing up a split second later – or distracted by a passing shadow.

Book time is like that.Continue Reading

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The Mysteries of Summer: Musetta Speaks Out on Travel, Ghost Cats, and Human Foibles

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Written by Musetta Simon

Musetta here, and I’m logging on to tell you: I hate summer.

Does that surprise you? As a cat, I am essentially a desert animal. My body temperature runs higher than yours, and I could lay in the sun for hours, soaking up the rays. (When I do this, my mom says I’m the solar-powered kitty, recharging.) But as a writer’s cat, I’ve learned a few things. And number one is that summer means travel. For my humans, of course. Not for me, and I hate that.Continue Reading

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Summer Book Suggestions for Cat Lovers

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One of my favorite summer pleasures is spending time outside with a good book. Even though a beach vacation is not in the cards this year, I spend as much time as I can on my deck each summer, and I make sure I always have a good supply of summer reading on hand. And of course, much of my summer reading is made up of cat books. The following books are just a few selections that I highly recommend for your summer reading list.Continue Reading

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Review: The Cat, the Mill and the Murder by Leann Sweeney

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Leann Sweeney’s Cats in Trouble series just keeps getting better and better. The series features cat quilter Jillian Hart and her three cats Merlot, Chablis and Chiraz, along with her human friends, who all live in the small town of Mercy, South Carolina.

In The Cat, the Mill and the Murder, the latest installment in the series, Jillian volunteers to help a local animal shelter relocate a colony of feral cats living in an abandoned textile mill. When she visits the mill, she finds a woman who is living there with her “ghost cat” Boots. Jeannie went missing from Mercy, South Carolina, a decade ago, after her daughter’s disappearance. After Jeannie is hurt in an accident and taken to the hospital, a body is found in the mill’s old fireplace. This is only the beginning of a series of long-kept, dark secrets, and Jillian finds herself drawn into yet another investigation.Continue Reading

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Review and Giveaway: Cat in an Alien X-Ray by Carole Nelson Douglas

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Carole Nelson Douglas’ Midnight Louie series, set in the glamour and glitz of Las Vegas and featuring feline detective Louie and his human, public relations specialist Temple Barr, is one of the longest running and best known feline mystery series. This four-footed sleuth has been solving mysteries since 1990!

In Cat in an Alien X-Ray, the 25th book in the series, Carole Nelson Douglas takes the reader on a wild ride as Louie and company encounter science fiction fans, UFO enthusiasts, and bizarre conspiracy theorists. Temple’s newest PR client is opening an “Area 51” attraction (the  code name for a military base in Nevada which has been the subject of conspiracy theories and rumors about UFO research) and wants Temple’s help to promote his new venture. When two bodies are discovered on the site, it is up to Midnight Louie and crew to unravel the multiple mysteries.Continue Reading

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Meet Leann Sweeney, Author of the Cats in Trouble Series

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I’ve been enjoying the Cats in Trouble series, featuring cat quilter Jillian Hart, who settled in the small town of Grace, South Carolina with her three cats, since the very first book. The latest in the series, The Cat, The Mill and the Murder, was just released yesterday.

In this installment in the delightful series, Jillian volunteers to help a local animal shelter relocate a colony of feral cats living in an abandoned textile mill. She never expects to find a woman living there, too. The woman, who went missing from Mercy, South Carolina, a decade ago, refuses to leave the mill or abandon Boots, her cat who died years ago. After the woman is hurt in an accident and is taken away, those who’ve come to town to help repurpose the mill make a terrible discovery, and Jillian tries to unearth a long-kept and dark secret with the help of a mysterious new feline friend.

Look for a review of The Cat, The Mill and The Murder on The Conscious Cat soon.Continue Reading

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Review: Parrots Prove Deadly by Clea Simon

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It’s no secret that I’m a huge fan of Clea Simon’s cat-centric murder mysteries. I knew I would enjoy Parrots Prove Deadly, the third in Simon’s Pet Noir series featuring pet behaviorist and psychic Pru Marlowe – I just didn’t realize just how much I would love it.

Pru is hired to retrain the parrot of a woman who has died in a retirement home. The parrot needs a new home, but isn’t likely to find one with the vocabulary of swear words he seems to have acquired, and the dead woman’s family is hoping that Pru can help. As Pru starts working with the bird, she is wondering whether some of the parrot’s words are a replay of the woman’s death, and whether that death could have possibly been a murder. The only other possible witnesses are a blind neighbor, her seeing-eye dog, and a non-commital health care aide. Pru can’t help herself: she begins to look into the woman’s death, and she gets drawn into a tangled web of family dynamics, possible land fraud, and a potential rabies outbreak.

With the help of her cantankerous tabby Wallis, Continue Reading

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A visit from Midnight Louie and Carole Nelson Douglas

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 Cat in a White Tie and Tails cover

Written by Carole Nelson Douglas

Midnight Louie is delighted that I was invited to write about him for the Conscious Cat and pleased to see photos of attractive torties on the site. (Frankly, like any hard-boiled PI, he can’t resist a female of any species.) And that may be mutual, much as I hate to encourage him. He looks gorgeously dapper on the cover of his latest release, Cat in a White Tie and Tails.

We have a tortie at home, rescued off the neighbor’s roof at 6 a.m. She’s called Amberleigh because she has green eyes and (some) red hair, like the Irish heroine of my first book of that name.

Midnight Louie was a rescue cat before he became a literary lion. Actually, he would deny he had needed “rescuing.” He was a motel cat. Continue Reading

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A life in cats, real and fictional

Books, Feline Lifestyle| 11 Comments

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Written by Lucy Burdette

When Ingrid asked if I’d like to write a blog about cats in my life as models for the cats in my books, I couldn’t wait to get started!

As I was about to turn thirteen, awkward and shy and brimming with early teenage yearning, I wanted only two things for my birthday. One was a date with Micky Dolenz of the Monkees. Which I could never have handled even had it been possible.

My second wish was for a kitten. Unfortunately, my birthday is in January and we lived in frozen Michigan, so kittens were scarce. But my pet-loving mother searched the animal shelters within a fifty mile radius and tracked down an orange tiger kitten. He had already been returned by one family, and so came with a “no refund” receipt.

Tigger was a huge hit, Continue Reading

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