I read lots of book reviews and love to listen to interviews
with authors on NPR. An interview with
Rita Mae Brown about her latest collaboration with her cat, Sneaky Pie Brown, Sneaky Pie for President, led me to
checkout and read these books in the “Mrs. Murphy Mysteries” series.
A small town in Virginia, a cast of characters who all know each
other and think they know everything about each other but don’t. The tiny post office serves as town information central and
its postmistress, Mary Minor Haristeen, known to all as Harry, is the biped
heroine.
There’s a four-legged cast as
well, Harry’s tiger cat, Mrs. Murphy, her Corgi dog, Tucker, and Pewter, the
next door cat who frequently eats, stays-over and adventures w/Mrs. Murphy and
Tucker.
There’s a lot of chatting going
on among the humans and the animals “converse” w/each other as they seek out
clues and solve the murder mysteries ahead of the humans.
Characters and dialogue are believably written, on the
whole, except for all the murders; hard to accept multiple murders occurring in
one small town. It’s mostly fun reading but a little too much background trivia
for my taste, for example: “throwing her
alpaca shawl, deep raspberry, over her wildly overpriced Wathne coat”. There’s lots of detail about taking care of
horses; again not my thing.
Bantam 1994, 298 p. and Bantam 1998, 230 p.
