Genre: Mystery
Hardcover; Mass Market Paperback; Audio CD; Digital Book
ISBN #: 9780451415479; 9781977350572
Berkley Publishing (Tantor Audio)
352 Pages
Various; $7.99; $18.81; $7.99 Amazon
July 1, 2014
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The bookmobile is making its usual rounds when Minnie and Eddie are flagged down by a woman in distress. The woman's husband, a famous artist, needs emergency medical care. After getting him into the bookmobile, Minnie races the man to the hospital in time...but his bad luck has only just begun.
After disappearing from the hospital the artist is discovered slumped over the body of a murdered woman. Minnie knows that her new friend didn't commit the crime, but the evidence paints an unflattering picture. Now this librarian and her furry friend have to put the investigation in high gear and catch the real killer before someone else checks out.
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Minnie and Eddie the cat are out for another day in their bookmobile when she sees a woman flagging her down in the road. When she stops it turns out the woman is Barbara McCade, and it seems her husband Russell, a famous artist, has had a stroke and she needs help. She broke her cell phone and has no way to reach 911, so Minnie helps her get him into the bookmobile and they take him to the nearest hospital.
Later on, after making friends with the couple she receives a frantic call from Barb. It seems her husband has left the hospital on his own and was found in the home of a woman recently murdered, and they think he's responsible. After hiring a high-priced attorney, it appears that Cade, as he's known, may be in the clear, but he's still a suspect, so Minnie decides to help find the murderer.
But it seems the woman wasn't discreet when it came to affairs - even though Cade and Barb tell Minnie that they barely knew the woman - yet Minnie still needs to find a murderer if she doesn't want her new friend to wind up in prison. With a little help from Cade and, of course, her loyal cat Eddie, Minnie might be able to discover the truth...
I started this book because I read the first in the series and love cats. But it almost lost me at the beginning. It's awfully convenient to the story line to say that she broke her phone, can't find her husband's and they don't have a landline. Anyway...Minnie has a cell phone, but she thought it would be better to bounce a stroke victim around on the dirty floor of a bookmobile (people walk all over it) than use her cell to call the paramedics? I guess she has all kinds of medical equipment in the bus that we didn't know about. What would she do if there were problems on the way to the hospital? Watch him die on the floor? That was just sloppy writing.
As far as her Aunt Frances' matchmaking goes, it all seems too pat for me. Did she only invite people who lived in the same cities? I can't imagine anyone just picking up their life so easily to move in with someone or get married. Leave your job? Sure! I have a partner now! Leave your home and family? Why not? No one makes a decision like that over the course of a few weeks unless their life is going bad anyway and they have nothing to keep them...but then again, if they can afford to be "boarders" for a few months, they probably aren't working anyway. Sorry, but Aunt Frances is a busybody who needs to find a boyfriend of her own and stop interfering in other people's lives. These people didn't sign up for a matchmaking service. She's an unlikable character.
As much as I love Eddie, I find it odd that a man who just had a stroke and his wife is worried about his health - would start a conversation with, "How's your cat?" I can't even imagine how that would occur to someone. No one has ever started a conversation with me asking about my cat. Ever.
Then there's the interesting part about the candy jar. People were making entries based on the number of original candies they saw in the jar; not a new amount that was less because of children digging their hands in the jar because a mother never taught her kids any better than to just take something without asking. (One of these kids was pretty smart-mouthed so I'm assuming they were old enough to learn manners). So even "averaging out" the number would have been a cheat because of this. She should have stopped the contest then and there and picked a winner from the people who had entered thus far; but Minnie doesn't seem to have a lot of common sense anyway.
I say this because she's a pretty bad sleuth. She just walks up to strangers and asks them about the dead woman - and they just tell her what she wants to know. They offer up unsolicited alibis without knowing why she's asking. ("Oh, I have a friend who's a suspect in a murder and I'm trying to find someone else for the police to turn to instead"). Really?
Now, I know people can develop allergies out of the blue, but it's hard to believe that a 35-year-old man has never been in close contact with a cat at least once in his life. Never had a patient who owned cats and had fur on their clothes or petted their cat before seeing the doctor? Never had a relative who owned a cat - aunts, uncles, cousins, friends, etc.? (Her response about never petting a llama was ridiculous - honestly, how many people own llamas that you know as opposed to how many cat owners there are in the US?) Even if you have an allergy to dogs, chances are you would have come across a few in this lifetime; and peoples' allergies can actually disappear over time. Will she choose Tucker or Eddie? Gee, that's a tough one to figure out.
Then there was the problem of Mitchell, who was hanging around the library because he didn't have anywhere else to go, and somehow it became Minnie's problem to tell him he wasn't welcome there anymore. (Actually, it was kind of creepy how he just hung around all day). She didn't really do anything about it, it sort of resolved itself and she actually came off as a bad employee.
So the police couldn't prove the phone call to Cade - the one drawing him away from the hospital - was ever made? They must be the most inept police ever. It's nice to know hospital phone calls aren't monitored - like when someone calls a hospital and has to ask for a patient and they get the nurses' station and the nurse has to transfer them to the room. But this hospital doesn't do that? They have no records of phone calls to a specific room on their logs? The telephone company doesn't keep records of this information?
These might seem minor details to some, but it is the minor details that make up the whole of the book, and I always notice details. If a book has one or two incidents that don't make sense I will let it go; but if there are too many - and there were others I didn't list - then in all conscience I can't ignore it and I won't give a good review if the book doesn't deserve one. Sorry, but there it is.
At the last, there were way too many people in the book, and because of this, no real clues to the murderer until the very last pages. There was no indications at all about this person, so to say it was a surprise is an understatement. However, I will read the next in the series in the hopes that it will improve.
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