Guest Post: Jeanne and Treadmill Books: Cat About Town (A Cat Café Mystery) by Cate Conte

Treadmill Books:  Cat About Town (A Cat Café Mystery) by Cate Conte

Maddie James has a successful business in California and enjoys her life there, but what should have been a brief visit to her Massachusetts island hometown is turning out to be a more protracted stay.  She came for the funeral of her beloved grandmother, but has lingered out of concern for her grandfather, who seems more fragile than she remembered.

And then she finds a dead body.

More precisely, the stray cat who just adopted her finds the body at the Food Stroll.  Not just any dead body, either, but the body of Frank O’Malley, the head of the Daybreak Island Chamber of Commerce who had been threatening to re-zone the area around her grandfather’s house to make it a business district.  Frank wanted the land to set up a business for his son, and Maddie had come to her grandfather’s defense in public meeting just hours before Frank meets his demise.  She’s not really a suspect, but the cops seem very interested in her grandfather’s whereabouts before the murder.

This is a “first in series” book, so there is a lot of space spent introducing characters and setting the stage for future books.  Maddie meets up with her ex-boyfriend from high school and finds he’s more attractive these days as a policeman.  She also has another possible love interest or two or three in the town but of course, she’s headed back to the West Coast and her juice bar—which would have been a lot more convincing if the book description hadn’t already told us she was moving home to set up a cat café. . . an idea thoroughly foreshadowed in the promotional text (and in the series title) but not actually decided upon until the very end of the book.  That’s not the author’s fault, but as a reader it slowed the book down for me. I wondered, more than once, how I would have approached the book if the Amazon publisher’s blurb hadn’t revealed all. (And it actually describes her “eager to settle down and start her own business” and that she’s “inspired to open a cat café” when the book has her planning to go back to California to her thriving juice bar business there.)

Maddie is a steady, middle of the road type character.  She has a practical side, and some business sense, which I liked.  Most of the characters aren’t fully formed yet, at least in my mind so I’ll reserve judgment on that aspect.  For me, there wasn’t a strong sense of place either:  it’s a beach, but going back to the book after a couple of days away I thought it was Florida until a character practiced pronouncing “Lobstah,” and I remembered it was supposed to be somewhere in New England.

The plot is fine, with an interesting resolution.

The treat is JJ, the aforementioned stray cat, who is a little charmer.  He takes readily to a harness, unlike some six or seven or twelve cats I could name, and has plenty of pluck.  Also, he’s orange.  I have a weakness for orange cats.

As a treadmill book, it passes muster—barely.  The chapters are nice and short, but once I hit the magic step number I was ready to put the book aside.  I’m hoping that when the second book comes out that the whole cat café business will be in full swing and more time can be devoted to characters and place to support the plot and fulfill the promise of the premise. Also, fewer promotional spoilers would help a lot.