The Catswold Portal

While Joe Grey has played tricks on Max Harper, Molena Point’s head lawman, he’s never had anything but respect for the dedicated sheriff. Now Harper’s in trouble, suspected of murdering two friends, and the only witness, a young girl named Dillon, has disappeared. Both Dulcie and Joe know Harper is innocent, and Joe is a Cat Spitting Mad, determined to prove his pal’s innocence—and find Dillon.

They looked and looked at the two women, at their poor, torn throats, at their pooled blood drying on their clothes and seeping into the earth.

The cats knew them.

“Ruthie Marner,” Dulcie whispered. The younger woman was so white, and her long blond hair caked with blood. Dulcie crouched, touching her nose to Ruthie’s icy arm, and drew back shivering. Blood covered the woman’s torn white blouse and blue sweater. She had a deep chest wound, as well as the wide slash across her throat. So much clotted blood that it was hard to be sure how the wounds might have been made.

Helen Marner’s wounds were much the same. Her blond hair, styled in a short bob, was matted with dirt where she had fallen. She was well dressed, much like her daughter, in tan tights, paddock boots, a tweed jacket over a white turtleneck shirt, her clothes stained dark with blood. A hard hat lay upside down against a pine tree like a sacrificial bowl.

No horse was in sight. The horses would have left the fallen riders, would have bolted in panic, the moment they could break free.

Dulcie backed away, her tail and ears down. She’d seen murders before, but the deaths of these two handsome women made her tremble as if her nerves were cross-wired.

 

It’s bad enough that Molena Point has been invaded by a famous writer and his suspiciously rude wife. Now the local yard sales have set off a host of puzzling thefts. In Cat Laughing Last, Joe and Dulcie take the case and soon discover that those sales hold a secret treasure someone will kill to possess. But before the fur can fly, these talented cats will unmask a murderer—and unearth a few other surprises along the way.

Since their arrival, Elliott Traynor had kept largely to himself as he finished the last chapters of Twilight Silver, the third novel in his historical trilogy. But Vivi had made herself known around the village, and not pleasantly—as if she enjoyed being rude to shopkeepers, as if she took pleasure in being abrupt and demanding.

The Traynors had not wanted a staff for the cottage they were renting, but had hired the cleaning service provided by Wilma Getz’s redheaded niece, Charlie. Charlie tended the Traynor house herself, early each morning, then left the couple to their privacy.

Molena Point’s residents, numbering so many writers and artists, were not put off by Elliott’s reclusive ways. They talked among themselves about his books and about the play, waved when occasionally they saw him on the streets or in the black Lincoln, as they headed to the theater; otherwise they left him to his own devices. The presence, alone, of the prestigious writer, seemed adequate enrichment to their well-appointed lives.

But no one had warmed to Vivi.

Traynor’s previous wife had died three years before. Six months later, he married Vivi, a woman forty years his junior. Besides her loud, rude ways, something else about her made the cats want to back away, hissing, a chill that perhaps only a cat would sense. Whatever reason she had for appearing this morning in the McLeary garden could only, in Joe Grey’s opinion, mean trouble.

 

Romance is in the air in the charming seaside village of Molena Point, California. Everyone is excited about the upcoming wedding of chief of police Charlie Getz, even cool feline detective Joe Grey. But the festivities are interrupted when two uninvited guests try to blow up the church. Then one of the bride’s good friends, building contractor Ryan Flannery, lands in a heap of trouble when her philandering husband is found dead. In Cat Seeing Double, Joe and his feline sidekicks sign on to the case, finding themselves in the biggest cat fight of their lives—a bare-clawed battle with a prey who is as cunning as he is deadly…

“Those stained-glass windows,” Dulcie said softly. “How could the killer have wedged the body in like that? To lift a deadweight, pardon the pun, at that angle and ease the body down between the windows…That would be like standing on your hind legs lifting a dead rabbit as heavy as you, hoisting it way out at an angle and slowly down without dropping it. The killer had to be strong. But why bother? What was the point of leaving the body there?”

“You don’t think he was shot there?” Joe said.