Spoilers.

This book was…okay. Not my favorite, but then again, I’ve not read anything in the mystery genre since my youngin’ days of R.L. Stine’s The Babysitter (not the best recommendation for the genre, I might add). I was therefore not quite sure what to expect of this book. It ended up being a mixed bag. It had an interesting plot, it kept me reading, and I never guessed the criminal. To be fair, it would have been real impossible to guess, considering you don’t meet the culprit until 3/4ths of the way through the book. But even after I met him, I wrote him off as too suspicious to be the actual criminal. Apparently not. So I didn’t guess, and that’s always a plus. Seeing the cat trying to work the human body was fun, too, and I could tell Babson did her research with regards to cat movements and moods (I believe cats are a specialty, at least according to the back of the book).

On the downside, a lot of the language bothered me. There were too many puns, too many rhetorical questions, and too much repetition of the phrase “heh heh heh.” It was funny the first 2-3 times, not the last 15. And then, really, in the name of all that is holy, why must we have cat sex scenes?? I don’t know. Maybe in the mystery genre, sex scenes are expected, and if this is true, holding to the formula when the main character is a cat is probably very clever and almost satirically funny of Babson, but for me, a non-mystery reader coming into this completely unprepared, I found the situation ludicrous, especially when accompanied by those lovely “heh heh heh”s.

So in the end, the book did what I wanted it to do. It gave me a pleasant break from difficult books for a bit and made me laugh a couple times. I don’t think I enjoyed it as much as regular mystery readers do. The front cover picture wins an A, hands down. And Jason was quite enamored with the phrase at the top of the back cover: Murder and Meowhem…