Mysteries come in many different flavours. When I want to be transported to another time and bamboozled by an ingenious crime, I pick up an Agatha Christie. When I want to be horrified by dated depictions of women and scary clowns, I pick up a Stephen King.
And traditionally, when I want a small town with lovable characters and cats, I pick up one of Lilian Jackson Braun’s “The Cat Who…” series. Qwilleran, Koko and Yum Yum hold a special place in my heart, as I found my first Cat Who (The Cat Who Knew Shakespeare) tucked away in on a shelf at the family cottage. With 29 in the series, I have been searching high and low for the missing ones for my collection at garage sales ever since. I’m still missing 19…
But I no longer have room on my shelves for a single new book. My two bookcases I reserve for series’ are packed, and the standalone for my mostly-unread standalones only has room if I read a book and decide to condemn it to the Free Little Library down the street. This lack of space and the 2023 Black Friday deal on Kindles spurred me to try out Kindle Unlimited, which is a massive catalogue of books available for 11-ish Canadian dollars a month - or in my case, a 3-month free trial. If you would like to read my thoughts on whether Kindle Unlimited is worth it, click here.
I made it my priority to find Canadian content in the Kindle-sphere. One of my first finds was The Cat Came Back by Louise Clark. Set in Vancouver, British Columbia, this cat themed caper seemed to hit all the right notes for a cozy mystery, and I tucked right in while on a flight to British Columbia myself!
“Stormy the Cat, rescued by journalist Quinn Armstrong, is not what he seems.
Young mother Christy Jamieson just learned her husband, Frank, embezzled his trust fund, sold their Vancouver mansion, and ran off with a socialite. Worse, Frank's trustees are telling Christy to let them handle it. But they aren't doing anything, and Frank's enemies are coming after her and her daughter.
Desperate to find Frank and fend off his enemies, Christy asks Quinn for help. His price: the dirt on Frank. But the closer Christy and Quinn get to the dangerous truth, the more convinced they become that only the one who knows where Frank is at, is Stormy the Cat.”
The best part about cozy mysteries is the ease with which they can be read. Their only job is to be fun, warm, and satisfying. They rank above a true romance, because they don’t usually have that saccharine sweetness that makes you feel silly once you realize you’ve been smiling for 30 pages, but below the tried and true detective fiction that can leave you melancholy and skeptical of human nature. This novel hit the mark, though occasionally it slipped more to the rough than the cozy, and accepting Smokey the cat’s involvement is a big ask from readers who might be more grounded and not anticipating a touch of magical realism with their mystery. The main character, Christy, serves as a blank enough canvas for a reader to imagine themselves in her shoes, and the supporting cast of characters bring life to the Canadian streets. Quinn and his father are likeable chaps and I looked forward to reading about them, and the characters we are meant to dislike are suitably dislikable.
Self-published (and hybrid) titles often get a bad rap, but it takes an immense amount of work to write a novel and make it perfect. Traditional publishing, which I will remind you is an industry with teams of people whose full time job is to make the book perfect (and I still find typos in their work…), is also traditionally inaccessible to many writers, and if the most important thing to an author is to share their stories and connect with readers, I believe self-publishing is a great option. This novel was a great example. There may have been a typo here or there (and none stuck out to me as particularly egregious) and some chapters could have been condensed or trimmed completely - but the story was complete, it served as a good jumping off point for a series by introducing characters’ that readers will care about, and it was easy to pick up. I’m sure getting it to that point of readability and coherence was no small feat by the author and is to be commended. Self-publishing is not for the faint of heart.
Overall, in short, I like cats, Canada, and cozy mysteries. 3.5/5 stars.
Happy reading and happy summer,
Holly
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