From Booklist
A cozy where the amateur sleuths do virtually no sleuthing and the identity of the killer is painfully obvious? Yes, but it goes down as smoothly as a spoonful of rice pudding. Genre veteran Babson can't be bothered much with investigatory details, but she has a sure hand at drawing-room farce, British style. Four aging actresses convene in Brighton, where two of the four are set to star in a revival of
Arsenic and Old Lace. Disaster beckons, however, when the death of Dame Cecile Savoy's "revolting floor mop" of a Pekinese sends the star into a near-breakdown. It only gets worse when the quartet find themselves implicated in the murders of a taxidermist and a missing housekeeper. Of course, there's a cat involved, too, a Japanese bobtail called Cho-Cho-San who knows more than she's letting on, and there's even some recipes, courtesy of the daughter of one of the actresses, who is writing a cookbook for actors on the road. Utterly silly and utterly entertaining.
Ilene CooperCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Product Description
Dame Cecile Savoy was chewing the scenery. In her carefully programmed grief, she demanding that her co-Thespian friends (actually more "rivals") accompany her to the taxidermist, where she is perpetuating the body of her ancient Pekinese, "that revolting little floor mop she was so attached to," according to Trixie. Finding the shop owner dead on the floor of his office was the first shock; finding the shop suddenly enveloped in flames was the next, but the final blow to Dame Cecile was discovering that instead of rescuing the remains of the expired Fleur de Lys, Trixie had snatched up a very much alive Japanese bobtail cat named Cho Cho San.
Triple shock is only the beginning for our harried friends Trixie and Evangeline. In their own lives, as opposed to those of the troublesome people who keep popping up, they are about to open in a play written specially for them. But they are thrust into a whirlpool of trials and catastrophes involving other people, all of which seriously cut into their time. A woman whose house guests they are battles with her much younger stepmother over their father/husband's legacy, Their hostess's housekeeper goes missing, and is found dead in the cellar. Evangeline inadvertently plies the guest who discovered the body with much more brandy than she can handle just prior to her interview with a detective. And Martha, Trixie's daughter, is in a state of panic about turning in the cookbook she is writing on time.
And then there's Cho Cho San. Somebody has to feed the poor beast standing in for the deceased Peke, (and there's hardly any food in the house for the human guests.) Somebody has to reassure her when she is frightened, find her when she is hiding, and give her the attention a nice cat deserves.
Babson's troops of fans will be delighted with this latest offering that typically combines a light touch and some wildly funny situations.
