CAT COMING HOME

A quartet of talking cats led by feline detective Joe Grey (Cat Striking Back, 2009, etc.) help the police catch a killer.

After her son and daughter-in-law are shot to death while driving the narrow mountain road to Lake Arrowhead, Maudie Toola takes her grandson Benny away from Los Angeles to start a new life. She hires neighbor Ryan Flannery to add a quilting room to the tiny Tudor she buys at Molena Point. Ryan, recently married to Clyde Damen, is one of the few humans privy to Joe Grey’s secret: Clyde’s stub-tailed tomcat can speak. When a series of home invasions rocks the quiet central coast village, who better than Joe, and his female companions Dulcie and Kit, to prowl the rooftops looking for trouble and reporting by phone to the police? The Damens’ good friend, police Chief Max Harper, is under intense pressure from outraged citizens like Arlie Risso to stop the crime wave. But the intruders just ramp up the action, trashing two local restaurants, breaking into homes and beating up the women who live there alone. Maudie’s nephew Jared Coletto moves in to watch out for her, even though his badass brother Vic just knifed Jack Reed in Soledad prison. But can Jared protect Maudie from her son’s killer? Only Misto, a yellow tomcat born in Molena Point but most recently a resident of Soledad, knows the answer.

Focusing on menace rather than mystery, Rousseau takes that staple of cozies—companion animals—and puts them in the center of a new hybrid—the talking-cat thriller.