Cat in a Neon Nightmare: A Midnight Louie Mystery [Hardcover]

I won't be reading any more of this series, though I might try the author's Adler series.

The author spends a lot of time trying to bring new readers up to speed. Unfortunately, the attempts to explain the various twists and turns in past books add little by way of clarity, and serve to distract the reader (at least this reader) from the story at hand.

While this mystery theoretically addresses the violent death of a woman, the human characters invest relatively little time, energy, or thought in trying to solve that mystery. The feline characters are considerably more interested in finding out what happened.

The investigation of this death is lost amidst a tangle of sub-plots. Characters appear, initiate discussions of Important Topics (not related to the woman's death), and vanish.

Imagine someone going to the roof of a building with a bushel basket of tennis balls. Imagine that person upending the basket so that the balls fall to the sidewalk below, bouncing in every direction. Imagine the person then describing where the various balls bounced to, and where some of the balls came to rest. That's the sense I had with this book -- the author's attention followed this bouncing ball, then dropped that one to check out another bouncing ball, and then on to another, then back to the first from another perspective. The investigation of the character's death was just one bouncing ball, often overlooked.

For me as one reader, this book was completely unsatisfactory as a mystery.

Readers who like stories with a lot of divergence would probably like this book better than readers like me, who like a sense of convergence and even closure of the story at hand.

Readers who enjoy characters who are talking cats, or characters who are humans with a penchant for feeling many emotions and then expressing their views about how they feel to other human characters, will undoubtedly like this book better than I did.

I've loved this series from the beginning because of the continuing character growth as well as the humor. And the zany Las Vegas background has evolved along with the main characters.

The author spoke recently at my local library, so I asked how come books I love, like this one, sometimes get such negative reviews online. She said sometimes a book's content will hit too close to home and really push a reader's buttons; at least that's what she's found with completely negative reactions. When I showed her a review on this book that was so opposite my reaction, she also said that people's opinions are just that, and they can't be argued with.

But she also was pretty puzzled that someone complained she'd labeled the character of Max as a "lone wolf" so many times it was to the point of nausea. So she did a word search for the phrase after she flew back home and emailed me the results: Max is called a lone wolf in only one of the 16 books: this last one, Cat in a Neon Nightmare. She only found that the phrase lone wolf used twice in earlier books, once by the cat detective, Midnight Louie, contrasting feline and canine behavior, and once as a metaphor for a motorcycle that plays a role in the series.

Amazing, some people aren't really seeing what's in the books, they're reacting to what they think they see. In fact, their comments can be downright wrong in terms of fact as well as opinion.

So my advice is to read these books for yourself and make up your own minds. And write your own review if you don't agree with with what's posted!