I picked up Carole Nelson Douglas’s Catnap and Pussyfoot from the dollar rack at a used bookstore a while ago. It’s hard to regret two bucks, but I would have felt better about them if I’d got them from the quarter rack (at a different store).
These are the first two books in another of the innumerable mysteries-with-cats series. Unfortunately, in these, Midnight Louie (the cat) narrates short portions of the story in this wannabe-tough guy voice that ends up being just insufferably twee. Temple Carr, the PR person from whose point-of-view most of the books are told, isn’t much better—not only does she have a tendency to think in strained “colorful” descriptive language, she’s the perpetually nosy type of mystery protagonist that I always want to tell to mind her own business.
I kept skimming these because they were very short and the looks at different industry events—a big bookseller’s convention and a stripper’s competition—were interesting. The one about strippers, which deals also with domestic violence, is more serious and gave me hope for a bit—there’s a notable description of what a thorough beating does to one—but in the end, I couldn’t get past the style. I might flip through some of these in the bookstore to see what happens with the mystery men in Temple’s life, but I won’t be reading the rest.