Monday, March 05, 2007

Mewdunnit

Felidae is a murder mystery that's solved by a cat. And it is brilliant. It cleverly avoids the obvious ickywooness of a tiresome American series about cute cats solving crime capers.

This is Heart of Darkness with kittens. If James Ellroy was a cat, this would be the book he wrote. It's gritty, filthy, funny stuff. And has that reassuring air of "Don't worry, singleton. You are reading a Serious Novel about cats. Well done. PS: Awww. Cute!"

At the back, it also contains a series of fascinating cat facts (and, worryingly, recipes). But misses out my favourite fact: The Ancient Egyptians loved naming things onomatopoeically. So, the Egyptain for cat is "mew".

6 comments:

Andrea said...

Go on depress me even more with your utter brilliance and tell me you read it in German!

Skip said...

Ha! My German is rubbish - but I may need it for the sequels.

I had a friend who would read a French Novel once a year. One year it was the novelisation of Le Retour Du Jedi...

Brian Sibley said...

A couple of your links in this post seem to be broken...

Skip said...

Sorry about that! Amazon is getting harder to link to.

Brian Sibley said...

Fixed... although in the case of the 'tiresome American series', that's probably all I needed to know...

Thanks for the recommendation of FELIDAE...

Anonymous said...

You'd think that Amazon would want to make links easy - it's good for custom, after all..

The book does indeed sound intriguing, I may well seek it out once I've finished Fragile Things