Cat on the Scent

Rita Mae Brown and her feline collaborator, Sneaky Pie Brown, have won a loyal readership with their six novels featuring that fearless investigator of mischief and mayhem, the tiger cat Mrs. Murphy. Now, in their most entertaining mystery yet, murder comes close to home.

As the men and women of Crozet, Virginia, prepare for a local Civil War reenactment, popular Tommy Van Allen is reported missing. No one's seen his single-engine plane, either--no one but Mrs. Murphy, who spotted it during a foggy evening's mousing in Tally Urquhart's abandoned barn. Even if fat cat Pewter insists that "nothing ever happens in May," Mrs. Murphy is certain that something sinister did occur that night on the Urquharts' deserted airstrip.

But how can Mrs. Murphy prove it when everyone in town is preoccupied with the debate over the region's new reservoir--and the money and power that are at stake. Even Mrs. M's favorite human, postmistress Mary Minor "Harry" Haristeen, bored by politics, can sense the dangerous anger brewing in some of Crozet's most prominent citizens.

Local tensions are set aside for the day when the gang--including Mrs. Murphy, Pewter, and Tucker the corgi--assembles for the reenactment of the battle of Oak Ridge. But when the smoke finally clears, someone is lying on the ground with three very real bullets in his back. While the clever tiger cat and her friends sift through clues that just don't fit together, more than a few locals fear that the ensuing scandal will force well-hidden secrets into the harsh light of day.

In the end, Mrs. Murphy's relentless tracking has consequences even she cannot imagine. When her efforts place loved ones in danger, it takes more than a canny kitty and her team of animal sleuths to set things right again.

The animals in Crozet, Virginia, are a lot smarter than the humans, which will come as no surprise to the devoted fans of Rita Mae Brown's mysteries featuring Mrs. Murphy the tiger cat, the luxury-loving feline known as Pewter, and Tee Tucker, a curious corgi. In their seventh outing, they're leaps and bounds ahead of Harry Haristeen, the spunky postmistress they call Mom. Long before anyone else knows what's going on, they've figured out the connection between the shot fired at wealthy Sir Henry Vane-Tempest during the reenactment of a Civil War battle and a missing airplane hidden in Tally Urquhart's barn. They're better at finding evidence trampled underfoot at a crime scene than any detective is, and they know just whose lap to drop it in. While they might not understand exactly why county commissioner Archie Ingram is so exercised about Vane-Tempest's plans for development in Albemarle County--particularly when it promises to make him as wealthy as the husband of the woman he loves--they've sniffed out the sexual shenanigans that threaten to derail the private pact between Crozet's leading citizens. If Harry and her friends knew what the animals know, there'd be no mystery about it; there'd only be a charming and lighthearted story of chicanery in the new Old South with plenty of local color, the scent of lilacs wafting through every page, and the deft prose of a writer on top of her game. But then, there'd be no raison d'etre for the liveliest scene in the book, wherein Mrs. Murphy, Pewter, and Tee take a turbo-charged Porsche for a breakneck ride through Virginia's verdant hills and dales. By the end of the book, the only mystery is whether Harry and Fair, her favorite ex-husband, will manage to get back together again in the next installment--or the one after that--of this popular series. --Jane Adams