MURDER AT MONTICELLO and MURDER ON THE PROWL, Rita Mae Brown and Sneaky Pie Brown

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.