The Cat Who Tailed a Thief

When small items disappear throughout the town, the residents are up in arms! Pickax has seldom fallen victim to "big city" crimes, particularly during the holiday season. But after the bridge club's money is stolen, the townspeople decide that there is more to this mystery. The rash of petty thievery started when banker Willard Carmichael and his much younger (and flashier) wife, Danielle, moved to Pickax from Down Below. Along with their big-city lifestyle, Willard brought plans to restore the Victorian houses on Gingerbread Alley (fondly known as Pleasant Street). Unfortunately, Willard is murdered in an apparent mugging Down Below.

When a local man is accused of the thievery, newspaper columnist Jim Qwilleran has serious questions about the recent crimes plaguing Pickax. For one thing, Danielle's cousing Carter Lee seems too eager to pick up where Willard left off in the restoration project. When he begins to romance wealthy widow Lynette Duncan, things really go awry. The whirlwind courtship ends as a new marriage. When Lynette is mysteriously poisoned while on her honeymoon in New Orleans, Qwill has a moustache-twitching suspicion that Carter is not the grieving widower and it isn't the recent flood in Pickax that has Koko in an uproar. It's up to Qwill, Koko and Yum Yum to set the town right and bring the guilty parties to justice before both the Duncan family fortune and Pickax are destroyed by greed.

In her nineteenth Cat Who. . . mystery, New York Times bestselling author Lilian Jackson Braun gives readers what they crave.