Comments for How to Paint a Cat

How to Paint a Cat: 08/13/14

How to Paint a Cat by Rebecca M. Hale is the fifth book in the Cats and Curios series. As I mentioned in my review of book, two, Nine Lives Last Forever, the blurbs for these books are deceiving. This time, the basic plot is described in first person present tense. But despite all the many points of view which really took off in How to Moon a Cat, none of them are written in first person or in the present tense.

The Cats and Curios series continues to buck with cozy traditions by allowing stories to unfold at reasonable rates. I read two other cozy mystery series set in San Francisco: The Party Planning series by Penny Warner and the Bibliophile Mystery series by Kate Carlisle. Both these series have main characters who are plagued by murder and forced by the extreme violence in their lives to be amateur detectives. So far in five books, there has been exactly one murder and that happened at the close of book three, How to Tail a Cat. In book five, the ensemble cast of characters are still reeling from Spider Jones's brutal murder inside city hall.

Were it not for the moon and bricks, along with the cats, of course, being given points of view in How to Moon a Cat, I would have been extremely skeptical of making Spider more of a character post mortum than he was in the previous book. Along with the copious amounts of San Francisco history, there is a growing element of magical realism.

But the solving of Spider's murder is tangential to the capers Oscar's niece is asked to participate in. This time her quest through the City takes her through the history of Coit Tower and its WPA era murals.

Is Spider's murder solved? Yes and no. There's a bit of a cliff hanger which will be addressed in How to Catch a Cat coming out in 2015. Will I keep reading? You bet!

Five stars

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