Baseball Cat (Big Mike Mystery/Garrison Allen) - Hardcover

Allen, Garrison

3.74

73 ratings by Goodreads

9781575661834: Baseball Cat (Big Mike Mystery/Garrison Allen)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1575661837 ISBN 13: 9781575661834

Publisher: Kensington Pub Corp, 1997

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Bookstore owner-turned-amateur sleuth Penelope Warren and her feline sidekick, "Big Mike" Mycroft, investigate when the owner of the Arizona Coyotes, a semi-professional baseball team, is killed by a blow from a baseball bat during the annual Empty Creek, Arizona, Elizabethan Festival.

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From Kirkus Reviews:

Bookseller-sleuth Penelope Warren and her Garfield-esque pet Big Mike are back on the scene as Empty Creek, Arizona, fields a minor-league ball club and starts the season off with a losing streak and a murder--namely, of Peter Adcock. Adcock was much disliked--he was team owner as well as, it turns out, an abuser of women and a dabbler in drug deals--so nobody seems to mind when he's found brained by a bat on opening day. Which may account for Penelope's being unable to focus on this rather simple puzzle until the rattlesnake chili contest and Sexy Lingerie Night are history and the Empty Creek Coyotes, thanks to a field appearance by Big Mike, finally get a win. Allen's cat-plus-a-hobby series is so filled with characters that many are reduced to walk-ons. And most not only seem too sweet to murder (even the murderer is awfully nice) but too involved in sex scenarios with their significant others to do violence. In this fourth installment (Stable Cat, 1996, etc.), there are enough naked-lady jokes to make a cat laugh. But our Big Mike, named for Sherlock Holmes's brainier brother, doesn't. An unsubtle, eager-to-please yarn that will appeal less to admirers of Bull Durham than to those who miss the rather corny, Hugh Hefnerish eroticism of an earlier time. -- Copyright �1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Booklist:

Thirtysomething Penelope Warren owns a mystery bookstore in Empty Creek, Arizona, and does some amateur sleuthing on the side. When the owner of the Empty Creek Coyotes, a minor-league baseball team, is found murdered, police chief Dutch Fowler asks Penelope to help find the killer. Penelope, her cat Big Mike, Dutch, and two doughnut-eating detectives have a fine time plowing through clues on their way to solving the crime. Set against a background of beautiful scenery and minor-league baseball (described in a manner that would please W. P. Kinsella), the novel moves briskly, with Allen supplying plenty of entertaining banter. What makes it all work, though, is the cast of well-drawn characters, especially Penelope herself, surely one of the wittiest and most intelligent women ever found in a cozy mystery. (Even Big Mike the cat works--and not just for cat people.) If P. G. Wodehouse had liked baseball and hung out in the Arizona desert, he might have written a novel much like this one. John Rowen

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