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Jul. 31st, 2010 11:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jennariaCAT IN A SAPPHIRE SLIPPER, by Carole Nelson Douglas.
Cover copy: Las Vegas PR honcho Temple Barr's beloved aunt Kit, romance novelist and hopeless romantic, wants to make sure her niece is on the right road to true love. But she winds up in a real romance of her own when she snags one of the most eligible bachelors on the Strip. Kit has fallen for one of the Fontana brothers, a silver-tongued reputed ex-mobster with a heart of gold.
And so there is to be a wedding - and a Las Vegas wedding at that!
But Vegas's glitz and glamor can conceal danger and darkness, and the Fontana-heavy bachelor party is, alas, no exception. The entire party is hijacked and taken to a remote desert ranch where the women are wild and the sex is legal.
Ill at ease among the raunch is Temple's own Matt Devine, an ex-priest turned talk-show host and Temple's secret fiance. Before Matt and the Fontanas can make their way back to the Strip, Matt unhappily stumbles upon a beautiful young woman who is quite naked and most thoroughly dead.
Given the remoteness of the location and the Fontana' shady reputation, this is a very bad thing indeed.
Luckily, Louie managed to go along for the ride. It's up to that big old tomcat to bail out his humans and save the day.
Gender of detective: one (ex)male, two female
More cats. Then again, there are kind of a lot of cat-related mysteries.
The hook for this entire series is Louie: the alternating first-person narration from either his POV or his daughter's (Midnight Louise, natch), in a very self-consciously film noir, 'I know the savage streets' hardboiled PI sort of voice, and third-person narration from the point of view of the various humans (without the self-consciously hardboiled detective elements). The cats think they're running the whole show, which is...well...not un-feline, anyway.
Honestly, my biggest beef with this book wasn't the cats, or the film noir narration (although I'll admit that hardboiled detectives aren't my thing particularly). It's not even the fact that when the cats solve the crime (as of course they do), it's because they stumble across the murderer talking about it, and then drag out Temple so she, too, can 'stumble' across it before the killer can make a get-away. (And when the killer tries to take her hostage, out come the kitty claws. That part actually kinda makes the book worth it.)
No, my biggest problem actually has to do with this being part of a series. By the time you're somewhere in the middle of a series, you've frequently got a lot of threads woven together. In this case, the previous book evidently left one really big thread dangling, in the shape of the presumed death of a major recurring character. Therefore, in this book, we keep cutting away from the pressure cooker of that distant brothel, to a Mysteriously Amnesiac Person who is recovering from a near-fatal, uh, skiing accident. It's not subtle, and it's not trying to be. It's even interesting (see also: Thia's weakness for trickster characters -- yeah, yeah, predictable, me). But for someone coming in to this series cold, it's also really really distracting.
*
We're being very quiet. I'm not sure how much of that is concentration, how much of that is Kris being polite and watching, uh, whatever she's watching on her computer with headphones, how much of that is Ian not yet being up, and how much of that is due to us not having had enough caffeine yet.
Don't worry. We'll fix that later.
Team Mariposa, Blogathon 2010. Sponsor me.
Cover copy: Las Vegas PR honcho Temple Barr's beloved aunt Kit, romance novelist and hopeless romantic, wants to make sure her niece is on the right road to true love. But she winds up in a real romance of her own when she snags one of the most eligible bachelors on the Strip. Kit has fallen for one of the Fontana brothers, a silver-tongued reputed ex-mobster with a heart of gold.
And so there is to be a wedding - and a Las Vegas wedding at that!
But Vegas's glitz and glamor can conceal danger and darkness, and the Fontana-heavy bachelor party is, alas, no exception. The entire party is hijacked and taken to a remote desert ranch where the women are wild and the sex is legal.
Ill at ease among the raunch is Temple's own Matt Devine, an ex-priest turned talk-show host and Temple's secret fiance. Before Matt and the Fontanas can make their way back to the Strip, Matt unhappily stumbles upon a beautiful young woman who is quite naked and most thoroughly dead.
Given the remoteness of the location and the Fontana' shady reputation, this is a very bad thing indeed.
Luckily, Louie managed to go along for the ride. It's up to that big old tomcat to bail out his humans and save the day.
Gender of detective: one (ex)male, two female
More cats. Then again, there are kind of a lot of cat-related mysteries.
The hook for this entire series is Louie: the alternating first-person narration from either his POV or his daughter's (Midnight Louise, natch), in a very self-consciously film noir, 'I know the savage streets' hardboiled PI sort of voice, and third-person narration from the point of view of the various humans (without the self-consciously hardboiled detective elements). The cats think they're running the whole show, which is...well...not un-feline, anyway.
Honestly, my biggest beef with this book wasn't the cats, or the film noir narration (although I'll admit that hardboiled detectives aren't my thing particularly). It's not even the fact that when the cats solve the crime (as of course they do), it's because they stumble across the murderer talking about it, and then drag out Temple so she, too, can 'stumble' across it before the killer can make a get-away. (And when the killer tries to take her hostage, out come the kitty claws. That part actually kinda makes the book worth it.)
No, my biggest problem actually has to do with this being part of a series. By the time you're somewhere in the middle of a series, you've frequently got a lot of threads woven together. In this case, the previous book evidently left one really big thread dangling, in the shape of the presumed death of a major recurring character. Therefore, in this book, we keep cutting away from the pressure cooker of that distant brothel, to a Mysteriously Amnesiac Person who is recovering from a near-fatal, uh, skiing accident. It's not subtle, and it's not trying to be. It's even interesting (see also: Thia's weakness for trickster characters -- yeah, yeah, predictable, me). But for someone coming in to this series cold, it's also really really distracting.
*
We're being very quiet. I'm not sure how much of that is concentration, how much of that is Kris being polite and watching, uh, whatever she's watching on her computer with headphones, how much of that is Ian not yet being up, and how much of that is due to us not having had enough caffeine yet.
Don't worry. We'll fix that later.
Team Mariposa, Blogathon 2010. Sponsor me.