THE CAT WHO CAME TO BREAKFAST

Maine's Breakfast Island, that is -- that's where megamillionaire Jim Qwilleran, bereft of his special friend Polly Duncan, takes his sleuthing Siamese Koko and Yum Yum to write a few columns for the Moose County Something on the deplorable new tourist facilities on the island, and to look into a series of""accidents"" (15 guests poisoned by bad chicken, one drowned, one the victim of a bad fall, one blown up in his cruiser, etc.) that have befallen mostly faceless visitors. Like Agatha Christie resolutely keeping up British standards in the face of a shrinking Empire, Braun maintains the forms of the American cozy -- an unsolved century-old disappearance of three lighthouse keepers; high tea with the island's queen mother, Rowena Appelhardt, and her 1920's-wayward brood; innumerable civilized conversations about the gentler pleasures of yesteryear- despite the insistent pressure of unpleasant 20th-century realities like land development, homicide, and plain rudeness. Less feline than usual, though psychic Koko's uncanny facility with dominos fingers (sorry, tails) two separate killers in this meandering page from the past.