Los Altos Town Crier » ‘Cat’ no bombshell but fun, fluffy read

By Pam Walatka

$Image from article \'Cat\' no bombshell but fun, fluffy read$

This is as cozy as a mystery can be. The deaths happen off-camera to people we don’t know and are of little consequence except to showcase the talents of a remarkable cat.

“The Cat Who Dropped a Bombshell,” by Lilian Jackson Braun (Putnam 2006), is the 28th book in the “Cat Who” series.

In Braun’s world, human life revolves around cats. “Then the rain came up, and it started to rain hard, and they returned to their respective condos … to be with their pets, who would need comforting.”

This is a book for cat lovers (ailurophiles). The two featured cats, Koko and Yum Yum, are clever and remarkable, and all the many cats are eminently adoptable.

Never mind who gets murdered; it does not matter.

The writing is murky. I frequently had to stop and reread a sentence - “Wait, what?” If I had read the previous 27 books, I would have known the lay of the land.

The temperament is lovely. Very mature people living in a small town “400 miles from everywhere” go about their business with courtesy and grace. They meet to talk, they talk on the phone and they exchange written notes. No e-mail. No rush.

At the remodeled barn where the protagonist, Quill, lives with his cats, “the only TV was in the cat’s quarters, and they watched only wildlife features.”

Even after the murders, “The hot topic of conversation in coffee shops, at bridge clubs and on the grapevine during late June was the Heirloom Auction - particularly the anonymity of donors.

Braun was born in 1916. She has an impressive fan base. A Google search on her name yields 203,000 hits. According to one of the Web sites devoted to Braun, she said the reason for her success is that “people are simply tired of all the blood. I write what is called the classic mystery.” She said that while “not all mystery fans may like cats, all cat-fanciers seem to like mysteries.”

This book is fluff, as fluffy as a well-brushed long-hair, and surprisingly hard to put down.

“The Cat Who Dropped a Bombshell” is available at Main Street Cafe & Books, 134 Main St., Los Altos.