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| Just couldn't get into the whole cats thing. And I love cats. |
The merry atmosphere in Pickax is dampened by the death of an out-of-town actor and the theft of a rare book.
Qwill finds himself distracted from the events by his finicky pal Koko, who's been acting more fishy than feline.
Has Koko gone bananas, or is he trying to let the cat out of the bag to solve the dual mysteries?
The history of Lilian Jackson Braun is perhaps as exciting and mysterious as her novels. Between 1966 and 1968, she published three novels to critical acclaim; "The Cat Who Could Read Backwards", "The Cat Who Ate Danish Modern" and "The Cat Who Turned On and Off." In 1966, The New York Times labeled Braun, "the new detective of the year."
Then, discouraged by the market's seemingly insatiable demand for sex and violence in mystery novels, she set the series aside for 18 years. After retiring from the The Detroit Free Press, where she was the "Good Living" editor for 29 years, she took up the series again with the publication of "The Cat Who Saw Red" (1986).
Within two years her publisher, Berkley, released four new novels in paperback and reprinted the three mysteries from the sixties. The 29th novel in the series, "The Cat Who Had 60 Whiskers", was published in 2007 when she was 93 years old.
Even though Braun claims that her cats have never done anything extraordinary, her fictional cats, Koko and Yum Yum, have solved crimes and delighted fans in book after book, ably assisted by newspaperman and amateur sleuth Jim Qwilleran.
