From Publishers Weekly
Nonstop one-liners, cartoon characters, pointless freneticism and a ridiculous denouement do not a mystery novel make. Country singer Kinky Friedman ( A Case of Lone Star , Greenwich Killing Time ) is back again as his own hero-narrator amateur sleuth. He sallies forth to help a friend whose tabby has vanished from a cat show at Madison Square Garden. A wildcat chase to the Roosevelt Hotel turns up only a note saying, "What's the mattercat got your tongue?" Then the body of a literary agent is discovered in the exhibition hallminus a tongueand the next victim after that is a cat-hating editor. Kinky is shot with a lion-tranquilizer dart by someone wearing a cat mask and wakes up to find a sexy woman sitting on his bed. She is Leila, a beautiful Palestinian-Colombian whose brother is a drug big shot. Kinky eventually finds himself between two warring gangs of lethal Colombians, and there's a bloody shoot-out before the unmasking of the killer. Fans of earlier Friedman mysteries may enjoy the mix of real and fictional characters, Kinky's bohemian lifestyle and some of the one-liners, but the murder solution is so sappy that it wrecks the book. Even cat-lovers will find this hard going.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From the Author
"Mysteries with cats as central characters have become so plentiful and predictable that I can't believe that I've written fourteen and a half of them. I don't kill quite as many trees as the woman who writes The Cat Who Got A Blow-Job, The Cat Who Killed Christ, etc., etc., but I am guilty of purveying the cat upon what I consider to be an essentially non-cat-loving world. I do this to irritate people.
I would also argue that the cat is not so much a character in my novels as it is a conscience. You remember those. A lot of people used to have them in the Sixties. Back then, consciences were really in style. They were almost as popular as cats..."
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
