Did curiosity kill the Cat Lady?

Sunny Coolidge left her New York city newspaper job to go back to Maine and take care of her ailing father. But there's not much excitement--or interesting work--in Kittery Harbor. So when Ada Spruance, the town's elderly Cat Lady, asks for help finding her supposedly winning lottery ticket, Sunny agrees. But when she arrives at Ada's with a stray tomcat named Shadow tagging along, they discover the poor woman dead at the bottom of her stairs. Was it an accident--or did Ada's death have to do with that missing lottery ticket, which turns out to be worth six million dollars?

Town constable Will Price suspects the worst, and Sunny's reporter instincts soon drive her to do some investigating of her own. Even Shadow seems to have a nose for detective work. Following the trail of the purrloined ticket, Sunny and Shadow try to shed some light on a killer's dark motives--before their own numbers are up...

Series: A Sunny & Shadow Mystery

Review

For fans of:  Miranda James and Rebecca Hale

When Sonata “Sunny” Coolidge took a leave of absence from her job at a New York City newspaper and returned to Kittery Harbor, Maine to help her father recover from his heart attack, she assumed the move was only temporary; she’d get her Dad healthy and be back to her urban lifestyle in no time.  But then her boss-slash-boyfriend terminated both her employment and their relationship, and all of the sudden, Sunny’s quick trip home began to look more like a permanent relocation. 

It seems to Sunny that life in Kittery Harbor is just as boring as it was when she was a kid – until, that is, Ada Spruance (aka The Cat Lady) comes through her door and asks her for help in finding a misplaced winning lottery ticket.  Sunny’s not thrilled at the idea of searching the smelly, decrepit home, but the prospect of finding a slip of paper worth millions is more excitement than she’s seen in months (plus, if Ada’s telling the truth, the story might give her an in at the local paper), so she reluctantly signs on.  Unfortunately, however, when she shows up at Ada’s house the following Saturday, the newsworthy discovery she makes is not a winning lottery ticket, but Ada’s dead body.  Sunny’s sure the old woman was a victim of foul play, and has a sinking feeling that it was her own gossip about the lottery ticket that got her murdered.  Will working to solve the crime help assuage her guilt – or will it just set her up to become the killer’s next victim?

As a native Mainer, I cringe every single time I pick up a book and discover that it’s set in my home state.  Mainers?  We don’t like outsiders, and while it’s probably good for tourism, we’re sick to death of authors painting us all like simple, small-town hicks who live in tiny towns where the cops are all idiots and everyone sounds like Seth from Murder She Wrote.  So to say I was trepidatious when I picked up The Big Kitty would be an understatement.  And while what I found when I cracked the cover wasn’t quite as bad as I had feared, it also didn’t fill me with glee.

The Big Kitty is the first of Claire Donally’s new Sunny & Shadow Mysteries.  While Donally makes a pretty big deal of the fact that her new series takes place in Maine (her entire “Note From the Author” is dedicated to hyping it), the book doesn’t have a terribly strong sense of place.  It does, however, have a fairly depressing and unpleasant atmosphere, and if the fictional town of Kittery Harbor actually existed, I’d be going out of my way to avoid it and its nasty, small-minded residents. 

Despite her name, Sunny is a dour, disagreeable, somewhat bitchy heroine; her one redeeming quality is the affection she has for her new cat, a former stray named Shadow.  Her father Mike is judgmental, cantankerous, and mean.  And while potential love interest (and town constable) Will Price seems a standup guy, Donally makes little effort to develop him past the cardboard cutout stage.  Shadow may be the only likable (and most intelligent) character in the entire cast, but Donally undercuts even his strength by having him narrate the occasional scene – and making him do so in an overly cutesy and childlike manner. Add to all of that the fact that the pace is slow, the setup is far-fetched, there are no real suspects or clues, and the plot is at once convoluted, haphazardly constructed, and somewhat boring, and you have a rather unsatisfying mess of a mystery novel.

Reviewed by Kat N.

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