Cat of the Century

February 15, 2010
Shady money dealings fuel Brown's solid 18th mystery featuring Mary Minor Haristeen and her cat pal, Sneaky Pie (after 2008's Santa Clawed
). Aunt Talley Urquhart is looking forward to celebrating her 100th birthday at her Fulton, Mo., alma mater, real-life William Woods University, but all is not well at WWU. Stockbroker Flo Langston, class of '74, is sure her hated classmate, Mariah D'Angelo, who heads the WWU Alumnae Association, has mishandled university funds. Mariah misses Aunt Talley's party and vanishes. Then someone shoots Flo dead at home in St. Louis after Flo reveals that Mariah has been selling fake high-end watches. Taunting messages (e.g., “Catch me if you can”) begin arriving in computer in-boxes of various WWU alumnae, including Inez Carpenter, Aunt Talley's 98-year-old best friend. Faithful fans already familiar with the characters will enjoy the cozy antics, but others may struggle to pay attention until people start dying.

March 1, 2010
Aunt Tally's centennial provides more excitement than anyone bargained for when alumni-association members get up to no good.

Fresh from yet another local murder (The Purrfect Murder, 2008, etc.), Mary"Harry" Minor Haristeen, small-town postmistress turned farmer, eagerly anticipates getting out of town to celebrate Aunt Tally's 100th year at the old gal's alma mater, William Woods University. Harry thinks she's leaving trouble behind but finds that the bickering among the alumni association members is the least of her concerns when Mariah D'Angelo, head of Kansas City's WWU Alumni Association, goes missing. Whatever Mariah's problems, she doesn't have to worry about her nemesis Flo Langston, head of the warring St. Louis WWU Alumni Association, because Flo has met with violent death. Soon Aunt Tally and friends receive e-mails from Mariah in a catch-me-if-you-can vein. Harry wants to look into the murder without becoming too involved, but her troupe of pets, including the ever-present cats Mrs. Murphy and Pewter, have different ideas. While they're sure this murder plot is more complicated than their humans could imagine, all they can do is hint at the clues and feign patience. In the meantime, Harry's amateur sleuthing suggests that money may be the bottom line of the mystery, a possibility that may appeal to more readers than Brown's sometimes politically charged topics.

While many of the human characters seem interchangeable in their combination of down-home folksiness and tribal-elder gravitas, her animals are witty as ever.

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March 15, 2010
The eighteenth Mrs. Murphy mystery is far from the best of the series. Harry, no longer postmistress, but rather full-time wife and farmer, travels to WilliamWoods University with her old friend Tally Urquhart for an alumni reception and, naturally, encounters murder and mystery. As usual, Harrys pets, Mrs. Murphy, Pewter, and Tee Tucker, travel with her and assist in the investigation. Heavy-handed dialogue intended more to deliver a message than move along the plot or develop the characters drags this one down. For dedicated series fans only.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)