Catnapped! A Dead-End Job Mystery

At the start of Viets’s lively 13th Dead-End Job mystery (after 2013’s Board Stiff), Helen Hawthorne and her fellow PI husband, Phil Sagemont, set out to retrieve a Chartreux show kitten, January’s Jubilee Justine, from financial adviser Mortimer Barrymore after Mort fails to return the animal per the terms of the shared custody agreement with his wife, Trish, from whom he’s almost divorced. The pair find Mort dead at his estate outside Fort Lauderdale, Fla.—his head was bashed in with Justine’s mahogany Zen Cat Tower, and there’s no sign of Justine. Sure that Trish isn’t the killer, Helen takes an undercover job as a cat groomer to search for information on the abducted kitten and alternate suspects. Meanwhile, the unexpected return of landlady Margery Flax’s ex-husband, Zach, disrupts Helen and Phil’s home life at the Coronado, their apartment building in Fort Lauderdale. The behind-the-scenes look at the show cat world is worth the price of admission alone in this witty cozy. Agent: David Hendin, D.H. Literary. (May)