The Cat in the Brown Suit

They said the first year of a business was the most volatile. Penny Lane didn't think they meant murder. Twice. Now the retired librarian turned cat hotel owner is trying something safer: a weekend at the Stonington Regional Cat Show, stewarding Countess, the champion Persian she inherited from a murdered breeder, through her return to the circuit. Then celebrity judge Mikhail Dorfman lifts Countess for his final presentation, delivers half a compliment, and drops dead in the middle of ring two. Four hundred exhibitors are locked in a riverside hotel with a poisoner, and the whispers say the scratch from Penny's cat did it. When the show's sharpest-tongued groomer turns up dead beside a rigged blow dryer, the hall finds its suspect in a single blurry photograph: a figure in a brown suit, lurking where he shouldn't be. Half the building has already convicted the rumpled treat salesman. Penny, whose eye spent thirty years finding the one wrong entry in a long correct list, isn't so sure the camera caught what everyone thinks it caught. Hercule Purr-row could tell them, naturellement. His nose sorted the matter on the first afternoon, while the humans argued over their little glowing rectangle. But the little grey cells keep their own counsel, and a detective of his stature has a windowsill to hold, a traumatized colleague to comfort, and a nap he has earned twice over. Between a skeptical detective, a judging schedule that stops for nothing, and a killer who prefers to be nowhere near the room, Penny will need every trick a librarian knows. Because the trouble with a blurry picture is that people see whatever they already expect. And the person in the brown suit is counting on it.