A Cat on Stage Left: An Alice Nestleton Mystery

Dieting can be murder, as Adamson (A Cat on Jingle Bell Rock, 1997) deftly demonstrates. When Mary Singer begs sometime actress, professional cat-sitter and amateur sleuth Alice Nestleton to board her cat, Alice agrees; the $2500 she's offered for four days of cat care is too good to pass up. But cat-sitting takes a backseat to murder when Mary's Bentley pulls up and her chauffeur calmly shoots her and drives away, leaving Alice with only a large, toy cat with button eyes and wheels for feet. Alice is skeptical when the dead woman's neighbor, Sam Tully, a retired crime fiction writer, suggests that Mary really wanted to hire Alice for her sleuthing skills, but when too many names from her own past seem connected with the dead woman she teams up with Tully. The two gumshoes follow the trail through a steamy New York summer to a shady diet doctor Mary once consulted, to long-forgotten actors and a director from Alice's days in drama school, to a butcher store where Mary transacted large amounts of business, and to a very hostile carpenter. The denouement may be a tad bizarre, but this feisty little mystery has pace and character enough to roll right over such small bumps. (May)