This is one of the series of the Cat Who mysteries with Jim Qwilleran. If you love cats and agree on how clever they are then you’ll love this series. I don’t have a cat but my family had them and my Mum now has a very clever cat with a rather siamese sounding meow, I can certainly see him doing some of the things Koko does. The only thing Koko doesn’t do is tell us how to solve the mystery, that’s only because he can’t speak English, if he could he’d then carefully drag out the clues keeping us in suspense rather than telling us quickly.

Anyway, back to the book. Jim Qwilleran is a reporter and it looks like he’s been demoted to the interior design pages, a world away from his normal base of operations, crime, but he seems to have a knack for finding the crime in the story and finds himself doing a feature on a very clever murderer. Koko helps him, of course, and collects a new companion along the way by the name of Yum Yum. At the end of the book Qwilleran has two siamese cats and it will be interesting to see how they run his life.

I thought this book was a nice marriage between a cat book and a murder mystery. All the clues were there and we only had to read them to make sense of the whole, something I rarely manage to do, I’ve read a lot of Agatha Christie and haven’t managed to pick the murderer yet. The writing was good and it was all packaged within 215 pages so there are no superfluous scenes and you have to read carefully as each word is important.

My only problem is finding time to read the rest of the series.