Canapés for the Kitties

September 1, 1997
Trouble is brewing in Brimful Coffers, a picturesque English village that is home to a bevy of mystery writers. Lorinda Lucas is heartily sick of the Sibling Spinster Sleuths, her series characters whom she now thinks of as "the repellent Petunia, the nauseating Marigold and the appalling Lily," and finds herself dreaming up final chapters in which the threesome meet their gory ends. Life in this halcyon village is not improved when detestable literary critic Plantagenet Sutton, known equally for his pretentious taste in wine, his nasty wit and vicious reviews, joins the enclave. Then it appears that someone is trying to bump off the writing community of Brimful Coffers--one is found frozen in the snow; another falls to her death in an elevator shaft; a third is savagely beaten with a hammer. Lorinda isn't sure what she should fear most--a real murderer on the loose, or her own creations, the Sibling Spinster Sleuths, who seem to be writing their own alternate chapters in which they openly plot Lorinda's death. A new nervousness in her writer friends Macho Magee and Frederika Carlson leads her to suspect that their characters have somehow come to life and are on a rampage as well. With the writers too shaken to do their own sleuthing, it takes three able felines--Had-I, But-Known and the rotund Roscoe--to run the murderer to ground. Babson's (Break a Leg, Darlings) lighthearted good humor and skewed view of the world enliven every page of this charming morsel of a mystery.