Tailing a Tabby

Bookmobile librarian Minnie Hamilton is flagged down by a frantic woman seeking help for her ill husband and Minnie transports them to the hospital in the bookmobile. One good deed to help someone in need sparks a friendship and soon Minnie is attempting to prove her new friend’s innocence when he is unexpectedly charged with the murder of a young woman.

This second book in the Bookmobile Cat series is just as charming as its predecessor. Minnie and the crew at the library, restauranteur Kristen, and the folks at the marina all return along with some new faces . . . and a new mystery to be solved. Minnie hasn’t lost a bit of the determination that drives her to help a friend and Eddie remains his irrepressible, furry self.

Recommended.

Bookmobile driver and library employee, Minnie, is back with Eddie, the bookmobile feline mascot. After reading Lending a Paw, I expected to read about someone ending up deceased again, but this one took me by surprise. This is a wonderful tale (or should I say tail) and once again it kept me up half the night. I’m beginning to expect that Laurie Cass will be the reason I walk around seriously sleep deprived for a while – her books are just that good. Her characters are becoming more defined and we learn a bit more about dear Aunt Frances; Stephen, the Library manager; Minnie’s best friend and chef, Kristen; along with her rather unusual neighbors. While it never occurred to me to live on a houseboat, this setting just seems right show more for Minnie and Eddie and I believe their story is only going to get better. I’m definitely looking forward to Book Three.
~ Linda Thompson, Host of TheAuthorsShow.com show less

Minnie and Eddie the cat are out for another day in their bookmobile when she sees a woman flagging her down in the road. When she stops it turns out the woman is Barbara McCade, and it seems her husband Russell, a famous artist, has had a stroke and she needs help. She broke her cell phone and has no way to reach 911, so Minnie helps her get him into the bookmobile and they take him to the nearest hospital.

Later on, after making friends with the couple she receives a frantic call from Barb. It seems her husband has left the hospital on his own and was found in the home of a woman recently murdered, and they think he's responsible. After hiring a high-priced attorney, it appears that Cade, as he's known, may be in the clear, but he's show more still a suspect, so Minnie decides to help find the murderer.

But it seems the woman wasn't discreet when it came to affairs - even though Cade and Barb tell Minnie that they barely knew the woman - yet Minnie still needs to find a murderer if she doesn't want her new friend to wind up in prison. With a little help from Cade and, of course, her loyal cat Eddie, Minnie might be able to discover the truth...

I started this book because I read the first in the series and love cats. But it almost lost me at the beginning. It's awfully convenient to the story line to say that she broke her phone, can't find her husband's and they don't have a landline. Anyway...Minnie has a cell phone, but she thought it would be better to bounce a stroke victim around on the dirty floor of a bookmobile (people walk all over it) than use her cell to call the paramedics? I guess she has all kinds of medical equipment in the bus that we didn't know about. What would she do if there were problems on the way to the hospital? Watch him die on the floor? That was just sloppy writing.

As far as her Aunt Frances' matchmaking goes, it all seems too pat for me. Did she only invite people who lived in the same cities? I can't imagine anyone just picking up their life so easily to move in with someone or get married. Leave your job? Sure! I have a partner now! Leave your home and family? Why not? No one makes a decision like that over the course of a few weeks unless their life is going bad anyway and they have nothing to keep them...but then again, if they can afford to be "boarders" for a few months, they probably aren't working anyway. Sorry, but Aunt Frances is a busybody who needs to find a boyfriend of her own and stop interfering in other people's lives. These people didn't sign up for a matchmaking service. She's an unlikable character.

As much as I love Eddie, I find it odd that a man who just had a stroke and his wife is worried about his health - would start a conversation with, "How's your cat?" I can't even imagine how that would occur to someone. No one has ever started a conversation with me asking about my cat. Ever.

Then there's the interesting part about the candy jar. People were making entries based on the number of original candies they saw in the jar; not a new amount that was less because of children digging their hands in the jar because a mother never taught her kids any better than to just take something without asking. (One of these kids was pretty smart-mouthed so I'm assuming they were old enough to learn manners). So even "averaging out" the number would have been a cheat because of this. She should have stopped the contest then and there and picked a winner from the people who had entered thus far; but Minnie doesn't seem to have a lot of common sense anyway.

I say this because she's a pretty bad sleuth. She just walks up to strangers and asks them about the dead woman - and they just tell her what she wants to know. They offer up unsolicited alibis without knowing why she's asking. ("Oh, I have a friend who's a suspect in a murder and I'm trying to find someone else for the police to turn to instead"). Really?

Now, I know people can develop allergies out of the blue, but it's hard to believe that a 35-year-old man has never been in close contact with a cat at least once in his life. Never had a patient who owned cats and had fur on their clothes or petted their cat before seeing the doctor? Never had a relative who owned a cat - aunts, uncles, cousins, friends, etc.? (Her response about never petting a llama was ridiculous - honestly, how many people own llamas that you know as opposed to how many cat owners there are in the US?) Even if you have an allergy to dogs, chances are you would have come across a few in this lifetime; and peoples' allergies can actually disappear over time. Will she choose Tucker or Eddie? Gee, that's a tough one to figure out.

Then there was the problem of Mitchell, who was hanging around the library because he didn't have anywhere else to go, and somehow it became Minnie's problem to tell him he wasn't welcome there anymore. (Actually, it was kind of creepy how he just hung around all day). She didn't really do anything about it, it sort of resolved itself and she actually came off as a bad employee.

So the police couldn't prove the phone call to Cade - the one drawing him away from the hospital - was ever made? They must be the most inept police ever. It's nice to know hospital phone calls aren't monitored - like when someone calls a hospital and has to ask for a patient and they get the nurses' station and the nurse has to transfer them to the room. But this hospital doesn't do that? They have no records of phone calls to a specific room on their logs? The telephone company doesn't keep records of this information?

These might seem minor details to some, but it is the minor details that make up the whole of the book, and I always notice details. If a book has one or two incidents that don't make sense I will let it go; but if there are too many - and there were others I didn't list - then in all conscience I can't ignore it and I won't give a good review if the book doesn't deserve one. Sorry, but there it is.

At the last, there were way too many people in the book, and because of this, no real clues to the murderer until the very last pages. There was no indications at all about this person, so to say it was a surprise is an understatement. However, I will read the next in the series in the hopes that it will improve. show less

Although this former librarian was going to dismiss Tailing a Tabby as merely an average, pleasant read, it improved by chapter 11. I enjoyed the bookmobile scenes. (It was amusing that the patrons called librarian Minnie Hamilton 'Bookmobile Lady' and her teen assistant 'Bookmobile Girl,' but they knew the bookmobile cat's name was Eddie.) The book does accurately convey how much a librarian can love librarianship and the joy of matching the right book to the right patron.

Eddie is black and white, not a regal Siamese, but he does share a character trait with Lilian Jackson Braun's Koko in the Cat Who series: Eddie tries to clue in his oblivious human.

The subplot about Minnie's Aunt Frances' worries that this summer's matchmaking show more efforts weren't going to according her plan annoyed me. Who cares if her boarders are matching with the wrong boarders? It's still a successful summer if they find their match, isn't it?

Minnie needed a poke in the ribs, in my opinion. She helps save a wealthy man's life and when he and his wife want to repay her, she doesn't ask for continued funding for the bookmobile??? That's something she's worried about.

Minnie is only the assistant library director the of Chilson District Library. The actual director is Stephen Rangel. While he's not as bad as high school principal Homer Knapik in the Scumble River series by Denise Swanson, he's definitely a thorn in Minnie's side.

The author introduces a possible stumbling block in Minnie's romance with handsome doctor Tucker Kleinow. I was getting really annoyed that neither Minnie nor Tucker thought of the obvious, but there was a reasonable excuse given for that late in the book.

The scene where Minnie finds herself alone with one of the suspects was pretty good. I also liked the scenes where she discovered what secrets two suspects were hiding, as well as the chase scene at the climax.

Chapter 16 has a sentence used to remember scientific nomenclature in biology.

All in all, I think I'll read the next book. show less

Minnie Hamilton and her side-kick, Eddie the rescue cat, are back in this second Bookmobile Cat Mystery. Minnie is still happily driving the Bookmobile truck to various locations around Chilson, Michigan ,while Eddie enjoys the love and attention showered on him by most of the library patrons.

Trouble awaits the book-delivering duo once again, of course. During Bookmobile rounds, the truck is flagged down by a woman in distress running down the middle of the road. She says her husband needs immediate medical attention. Minnie helps the woman get her husband to the hospital, learning that he is a famous painter. Concern for the welfare of the painter turns into a new blossoming friendship with the two. Little does Minnie know that the show more painter will soon require her sleuthing skills as well when he is accused of murder.....

This series is fun and enjoyable to read. I like Minnie...she doesn't take herself too seriously and enjoys her job. And Eddie.....he is just a hoot. I find it cute that library patrons sometimes come to the Bookmobile just to pet Eddie.

As for the plot, don't expect reality. Cozy mysteries are not really something I expect to be realistic. Just like with amateur detective television shows, reality has to be suspended allowing readers to believe that an innocent Bookmobile librarian might discover murderers and corpses along her designated route on a regular basis. On television, Jessica Fletcher went 10 years on Murder She Wrote finding at least one corpse each week without law enforcement batting an eye. So I'm able to suspend reality and let a librarian discover as many bodies as is required for the series. With reality suspended to enjoy the story, the plot was well done in this second book in the Bookmobile mystery series. It moved along at the right speed with just enough clues sprinkled here and there to keep me happily reading. I like Cass' writing style and character development. Her characters are likable, and enough humor and side-plots are incorporated to keep the story flowing nicely without being totally bogged down by the required murder.

The cover art for this series is awesome!

I'm definitely going to read the 3rd book in this series! show less

Minnie is completing her bookmobile run when a frantic woman flags her down and begs for help for her husband who has suffered a stroke. Thus begins an acquaintance that will take Minnie down a rather rough trail. When her new friend is accused of murder, Minnie decides to help clear his name. But she herself isn’t quite sure of his innocence. She vacillates in her thinking, adding suspects to her list, and trying to decide who is telling the truth and who isn’t. It’s a quick and entertaining mystery, made all the better by her cat Eddie and his mischief. It’s always interesting to see Minnie coping with ordinary day-to-day problems as she delves deeper into solving the murder.

This was, generally, a good read and a better-than-average cozy. Heaven knows I needed something light-hearted after my last read - a literary sorbet and Tailing a Tabby was certainly that. Likeable characters, an awesome cat with realistic, cat-like powers of condescension, a quaint setting and a pretty decent plot made the book go quickly, although I can't say I was engrossed or invested.

My complaints are small, really. Minnie is driving the bookmobile back to the library when a woman runs out into the road and flags her down, begging for help for her husband who has just had a stroke. She helps them get to the ER and a bond is (understandably) formed between Minnie and the couple. Less than two weeks later, the man is found hunched show more over the body of a murder victim, and he's arrested. He's innocent, of course, and Minnie must clear him.

This couple lives out in the middle of back-country Michigan in a house without a landline and sketchy, spotty cellular coverage. I live in a house without a landline but I live in a metropolitan city - if I was living in the country and had no coverage you'd bet your sweet bippy I'd have a landline - for just such occasions as these. Common sense aside, it's seems obvious to me that the author created this situation to justify Minnie coming across the woman and being in a position to help which leaves me with the feeling that the story was forced.

My other, relatively small, complaint is the interrogating the MC does. She doesn't run around accusing people of murder and she doesn't jump to silly conclusions based on air, but she does go out of her way to question "suspects" and she does hide things from the police. It was just enough for me to sigh heavily while reading, not enough to even make me roll my eyes (much).

Mostly, the book was "ok" - a little bit better than "ok" maybe. I don't consider the time I spent reading it wasted at all, and I'll definitely read the third book. show less