Blaize and John Clement. The Cat Sitter’s Whiskers. New York: St. Martin’s, 2015. Print.
This is approximately the tenth Dixie Hemingway mystery. I may have read one a long time ago because the main character is vaguely familiar. Ms. Hemingway is a pet sitter in Sarasota, Florida. She is a former sheriff’s deputy, and like amateur sleuths from Father Brown to the Hardy Boys, she always seems to find herself in the middle of a mystery. (How I envied those Hardy Boys when I was a kid—how did they keep finding mysteries? I would have been happy with one!)
Early one morning as she is making her first stop to check on various pets, she is knocked out while observing a strange ritual being acted out by a masked intruder. The police do not honestly believe her unusual tale, especially since nothing is missing from her clients’ house.
The only potential witness is the paper delivery man, Levi, someone she has known from town since grammar school. His car passed her on the road right near the house where she was attacked. When she goes to look him up at his place—she finds his body. The plot thickens. The blood coagulates.
There are a lot of curious characters in The Cat Sitter’s Whiskers. We have Detective McKenzie who investigates such crimes and appears to be scatterbrained and OCD at the same time. There is Levi’s stridently jealous fiancée. We discover a mysterious woman who claims Levi picked her up at a club and abused her a few hours before he was murdered. There are the politically correct gay brother and Dixie’s “almost boyfriend” who is a Seminole lawyer.
The Cat Sitter’s Whiskers is a humorous diversion. It makes Florida appealing—beaches, fragrant flowers, beautiful sunsets—and maybe a bit rough—murders, beatings, drug dealers, criminal syndicates. There are worse ways to spend a couple of hours.
Though all the Dixie Hemingway stories have something about cats in the title, our protagonist is a pet sitter, so there are dogs and few other creatures as well. Unlike the Chet and Bernie series, the animals are incidental to the story. They are mostly used to introduce us to characters in the mystery. I am definitely a dog person—many cats make me sneeze—but that makes little difference in these books.