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Book 16, 2016
Feb. 21st, 2016 12:03 pmOn Friday, I brought my work book home, and I finished it last night. It was Baseball Cat by Garrison Allen. It appears to be part of the author's "Big Mike" mystery series.
Big Mike is a large Abyssinian cat (Mycroft, by name), owned by Penelope Warren. Since I sort of came into the middle of things, I was left to surmise that Penelope owns the local bookstore, Mycroft & Company, and she is an accomplished amateur sleuth. So accomplished, in fact, that the local police call her in to help investigate the scene of a recent murder. This was the first of many things that annoyed me about the book.
1. Police don't invite civilians to assist with investigations, ever, unless there are special circumstances, such as calling in an expert on Medieval weapons to identify a sword used to kill someone.
2. Is Garrison Allen a frat boy? Because the book read like it had been written by one. All of the female characters were beautiful and buxom, all of them were into kinky sex, they all allowed an artist to paint them in the nude, and the head of the Chamber of Commerce, Lora Lou Longstreet, even gave permission for her portrait to be hung prominently in the local bar. Really?!
The premise of the story is that Empty Creek, AZ, has a new, minor league baseball team named the Coyotes. On opening day, coach Rats McCoy discovers the dead body of the team's owner. He's been killed with a baseball bat. Once Penelope is called in to help, she begins looking into the man's relationships, finances, and the deal he cut with the city to get the team in there. In the meantime, the hapless Coyotes are on a losing streak, the GM is attacked in her office late at night, Penelope and Big Mike are running to and fro, and a former major-leaguer on the Coyotes has his comeback endangered when someone plants a bottle of vodka in his locker.
Annoyances aside, the story was fairly entertaining. It clipped along at a good pace, and there were some laugh-out-loud moments (embarrassing, when reading in the break room at work!). However, I wasn't privy to the final clues that Penelope put together, which I felt denied me a chance to figure out whodunnit along with her. That was Annoyance Number 3.
Frankly, I don't know as that I'd seek out any more of this series, unless I happen to find them in ebook format for free. *shrugs*
Favorite lines:
♦ He'd had a most strenuous morning--eating, bathing, falling from the windowsill twice.
♦ "You can't throw the cat out of the game," Rats yelled. "He's not even on the roster."
I was going to give this book an average rating of three, but that scene, wherein Big Mike gets ejected from a baseball game for interference, and Rats McCoy goes on a rampage, a la Billy Martin, was so hysterically funny, that I am compelled to up the score to four:
♦♦♦♦
Big Mike is a large Abyssinian cat (Mycroft, by name), owned by Penelope Warren. Since I sort of came into the middle of things, I was left to surmise that Penelope owns the local bookstore, Mycroft & Company, and she is an accomplished amateur sleuth. So accomplished, in fact, that the local police call her in to help investigate the scene of a recent murder. This was the first of many things that annoyed me about the book.
1. Police don't invite civilians to assist with investigations, ever, unless there are special circumstances, such as calling in an expert on Medieval weapons to identify a sword used to kill someone.
2. Is Garrison Allen a frat boy? Because the book read like it had been written by one. All of the female characters were beautiful and buxom, all of them were into kinky sex, they all allowed an artist to paint them in the nude, and the head of the Chamber of Commerce, Lora Lou Longstreet, even gave permission for her portrait to be hung prominently in the local bar. Really?!
The premise of the story is that Empty Creek, AZ, has a new, minor league baseball team named the Coyotes. On opening day, coach Rats McCoy discovers the dead body of the team's owner. He's been killed with a baseball bat. Once Penelope is called in to help, she begins looking into the man's relationships, finances, and the deal he cut with the city to get the team in there. In the meantime, the hapless Coyotes are on a losing streak, the GM is attacked in her office late at night, Penelope and Big Mike are running to and fro, and a former major-leaguer on the Coyotes has his comeback endangered when someone plants a bottle of vodka in his locker.
Annoyances aside, the story was fairly entertaining. It clipped along at a good pace, and there were some laugh-out-loud moments (embarrassing, when reading in the break room at work!). However, I wasn't privy to the final clues that Penelope put together, which I felt denied me a chance to figure out whodunnit along with her. That was Annoyance Number 3.
Frankly, I don't know as that I'd seek out any more of this series, unless I happen to find them in ebook format for free. *shrugs*
Favorite lines:
♦ He'd had a most strenuous morning--eating, bathing, falling from the windowsill twice.
♦ "You can't throw the cat out of the game," Rats yelled. "He's not even on the roster."
I was going to give this book an average rating of three, but that scene, wherein Big Mike gets ejected from a baseball game for interference, and Rats McCoy goes on a rampage, a la Billy Martin, was so hysterically funny, that I am compelled to up the score to four:
♦♦♦♦
