PAWS TO REMEMBER

A body discovered behind drywall leads an adopted woman in a small town to question where she’s really from.

Kathleen Paulson is a dependable friend. She’s somebody you can call to help with rodent duty, which is exactly what her friend Maggie does when a pipe bursts in the River Arts building, her artists’ co-op, leaving her with the unenviable tasks of ripping out drywall and finding God-knows-what in the walls. It’s not that Kathleen is some sort of rodent Dr. Doolittle; she just has the help of supernaturally talented cats Owen and Hercules to do some of the dirty work. As they would say, Merow. While tearing down the walls, Kathleen, Maggie, and Harry the maintenance man find something more shocking than a mouse or two: a human body shrouded in plastic and probably hidden in the wall a few decades ago. In bucolic Mayville Heights, Minnesota, it’s appalling enough to find a body, but Kathleen’s fiance, Det. Marcus Gordon, and the rest of the department think the body is that of a murder victim. When it’s identified as Lily Abbott, a heavily pregnant teen who everyone assumed had run away, Kathleen is saddened to imagine what may have happened. And she’s scandalized when Ella King approaches her with the suggestion that Lily had given birth before her death, and that she, Ella, is Lily’s daughter. Given her great track record of nosing into past Mayville mysteries and with Marcus as an inside connection to the police, Kathleen is determined to help Ella learn the truth about her origins.

Heavy on the world of continuing characters, with a few cat moments thrown in as crowd pleasers.