Here, Kitty, Kitty

A plucky cat and her human companions stumble upon some Pleistocene Era beasties in Elze's clever, entertaining second novel (after The Changeling Garden), in which woolly mammoths, sabertooth tigers and other extinct animals mysteriously show up in an Adirondack village. The novel opens on an August night as Emma Vernon rows out to nearby Tenacre Island to retrieve her stranded cat, Billie, whose thoughts and adventures are deftly chronicled throughout the story. Billie regularly visits the ""otherside,"" a 10,000-year-old place where humans wear animal skins, carry clubs and live amidst sabertooth tigers and other wild creatures. When Emma tells her husband, Max, a cartoonist, that she saw a huge deer with antlers ""at least nine feet wide"" on the island, he good-naturedly dismisses her claim. A year earlier, Emma's father, a high-school physics teacher, was viciously killed there by an unknown animal. After a local restaurateur is murdered, villagers vow to hunt down the four-legged attacker, while Emma and Rutledge, the animal control officer, try to capture the growing number of ""extinct"" animals before they're killed. Suspecting that the animals are coming from the island, Emma goes there and stumbles briefly into the ""otherside,"" where she learns how her father's space-time experiment has perilously opened the doors between the past and the present. The story's neatly wrapped-up ending disappoints, but Elze's taut dialogue, intelligent plot and simmering suspense make this novel enjoyable. (July)