This is the fourth book in the Cat Who series. There’s only 29 mysteries in this series and unlikely to be more. Number 30 was cancelled when Braun died in 2011. You’ll find I scribbled a few words about the second book The Cat Who Ate Danish Modern four years ago!
This time Qwill is given the chance to write about good food and wine, dining out at all the best restaurants and the newspaper picks up the tab. The only thing that makes him even slightly happy about this assignment is the chance to take home a doggie bag for the cats, Koko and Yum Yum. He starts off at the Maus Haus, ends up with an invitation to stay for a while and with the help of KoKo solves the unsolved suicide.
The animal references I’ve used are all in the book, I plead guilty to copying them. I also plead guilty to getting lost again within the pages of the book. I picked it up to check on one or two things and almost forgot to stop reading. What stopped me was coming across a couple of interesting things, neither of which I would have noticed before starting uni. One I can only refer to as foreshadowing as it’s a spoiler and the other is where Braun tells us with one quick sentence what the interogatee is like and how you’d read the exchange. The description of mud is delightful.
The market manufactures an exclusive brand of…mud, composed of wilted cabbage leaves, rotted tomatoes, crushed grapes, and an unidentifiable liquid that binds them together in a slimy black…amalgam.
Very evocative and I can just about smell it. Not only that it gives us many clues about the speaker. If I were casting this I’d be looking for someone with a slight upperclass English accent, despite it being American, who looks down his nose at people.
What else do you have in here? Food! And I put on weight just looking at food, imagine what happens when I read about it! Some of the dishes do sound delicious. Qwill also meets up with an old girlfriend, I will say nothing happens between them, sometimes meeting up with your ex is a good thing. There’s good writing, lots of clues which I didn’t spot in the first reading and some enjoyable cats.