I was feeling in the mood to vegetate today, so I rooted out this old book that I probably read 20 years ago.
It’s hard finding good trash. There’s an endless amount of solid serious literature, but finding books that are easy on the brain but still marginally well-written is hard.
This was originally published under the name Death Swap, but this edition was renamed and got a cheesy cat cover to trick cat mystery lovers into buying it — and as the Goodreads rating shows, they didn’t like it. Because while there is indeed a cat in the book, it doesn’t really figure in a material way in the plot.
Which reminds me — after buying a couple of these books via Amazon, Amazon stared recommending me a gazillion cat themed mystery books with breathless reviews, and I though “what the hey” and bought a handful, and they were almost all of them seemingly written by illiterate doofuses. That’s the problem with recommendation algorithms based on “you bought this thing, these other people bought this thing and they also bought these other things, so you should buy these other things”. Because people have different reasons for buying things. I bought this because it’s a moderately well-written mystery, while other people bought it because there’s a cat on the cover.
I don’t mind books featuring cats, really!
Anyway, this isn’t really a good book, but it’s written just fine on a sentence by sentence basis. The plot is pretty naff, even if it’s pretty original.
Paws For Alarm (1984) by Marian Babson (Buy used, 3.3 on Goodreads)