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“The Cat Who Went Bananas” by Lilian Jackson Braun

The Cat Who Went Bananas is available at Diesel Ebooks and Amazon.com.

Imagine, if you will, a small, quiet, remote town with murder rate well above the national average. Imagine a climate so forbidding that a neighboring town is called “Brrr”. Imagine an eccentric populace of cat owners and cat lovers who look with distrust upon outsiders and ailurophobes. Imagine your host as a small time columnist for a local newspaper called the “Something” who owns one TV set—for his cats. Why on earth would you return to visit that host in that town twenty seven times?

Libraries and bookstores may label The Cat Who Went Bananas a mystery. I call it a vacation. In this installment of Lillian Jackson Braun’s Cat Who… series, the reader–or at least this reader–cares little about the “Whodunit” or even the “Whydunit” or “Howdunit” of the story. What really matters is that the reader is once again transported “400 miles north of everywhere” to eat, drink, commune and relax in a community where time has slowed down a notch. Protagonist James McIntosh Qwilleran is a gracious host who takes pride in his town and is perpetually involved in new civic endeavors when not writing his column or solving crimes with the help of his Siamese cat.

Notwithstanding its crime rate, Pickax is a literate, artistic town with more than a small town’s share of bookstores, theaters, art centers, restaurants and kilt-wearing Scotsmen. Its citizens relish learning about new crafts and classic theater and literary works and the reader learns along with them. The townspeople’s attitude toward cats is admiring but unsentimental, and the cats themselves are undoubtedly cats, not humans in cat form. To Pickax’s credit, nearby towns, such as Lockmaster and Purple Point usually provide the criminals.

To enjoy The Cat Who Went Bananas one does not need to read the previous twenty-six novels in the series although such a venture would prove enjoyable. Each novel can stand on its own. The reader, however, would find most enlightening the background information in the first five novels: The Cat Who Could Read Backwards, The Cat Who Ate Danish Modern, The Cat Who Turned On and Off, The Cat Who Saw Red, and The Cat Who Played Brahms. These books follow Qwilleran’s odyssey from divorced washed up crime reporter scratching out a living in Chicago to a cat-loving volunteer columnist in Pickax and by the way the richest man in the county.

© 2008 Girlebooks.