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When Pets Investigate

Author: Rita Mae Brown

The town of Crozet, Virginia is preparing for a snowy Christmas season. Almost everyone in town is busily involved in some holiday charity preparations, bringing food and company to those in need or continuing to work with the local youth organization, Silver Linings, in their blowout annual fundraiser. But someone isn’t feeling the holiday spirit. They want to take, not give. With two bodies of prominent citizens, bastions of Silver Linings no less, discovered, the town is desperate to find the culprit.

Meanwhile, on a nearby farm that belongs to Harry and her husband Fair, an ancient skeleton is uncovered. What other secrets lie buried, just beneath the pristine snow?

This is my first adventure in the Mrs. Murphy mystery series, which oscillates between a wide cast of human protagonists, two cats, and one dog. The animals see more than the people do and are integral to finding clues (and buried murder victims!) and their chapters add to the quaint and cozy by giving a voice to the normally voiceless.  This edition also gives us a talking coyote, as well as a few barn critters.

The problem is that despite proclaiming itself as a standalone, Nine Lives to Die is the 23rd in the series, and I suspect that starting here caused me to miss much of the magic as well as the history and personalities of the citizenry. You can’t jump into a world twenty plus books in and expect to understand all the subtilties, relationships, and heartbreaks. So . . . by that very admission, this review will be inferior. For a comparison to other books in the series and a look at the series as a whole, seek a more knowledgeable reviewer.

Still with me? Is it *that* kind of slow day at work? Well . . . ok then.

What I found charming about this series was, of course, the animals. Their dialogue with one another (the humans, of course, cannot understand it) is charming and adds to the cozy. Mostly, however, the animals squabble and joke. They do stumble upon the skeleton, accidentally, and are somewhat instrumental in its revelation, but they really don’t do any mystery solving, as I’d been led to suspect by the book’s back cover blurb.

Image by huoadg5888 from Pixabay

Likewise, the humans in this tale are so busy with their own good deeds, that the murders and mysteries languish on the back burner. Fair and Harry, the main characters (I guess?) are non-entities. All they do is pick up and deliver groceries and watch the events around them, but they don’t act or interact with their world at all. This means that the investigation falls into that usual cozy mystery mistake: things happen, the answer is simply given, and the baddie comes forward stupidly and confesses when literarily no one was onto him/her or even really investigating the various crimes. It’s disappointing.

The plot itself, with the final twist, is separated into two main stories, each with seperate reveals. The skeleton and the murders aren’t connected. The skeleton story is decent, albeit kind of farfetched, and the criminal tips their hand wayyyyyy too early. It’s not believable, but it is a bit juicy, so it’s entertaining. The murders, on the other hand, fall vastly short. The hints were there, and they went where we predicted, and it wasn’t pretty. It’s not believable, and it’s not especially good. This time we don’t even get the criminal’s confession, but the confession of someone else who explains it all, sort of, in third person, after the fact.

I can see that this series has promise, and I suspect that earlier books are far stronger. I’ll probably check them out, at least for the animals. If you’re interested in Nine Lives to Die I recommend starting at the beginning of the Mrs. Murphy series and going from there, which is my plan. We’ll see if the second chance is earned . . .

– Frances Carden

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Frances Carden
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