Canapes for the Kitties by Marian Babson Review
St. Martin's Press, Sept., 1997.Hardcover, 221 pages.
ISBN: 0312169299.
Ordering information: Amazon.com.
Popular mystery author Lucinda Lucas has a
terrible secret. She loathes
Miss Petunia, Lily and Lorinda, her fictional crime-solving
spinsters so beloved to her editors and her public. Unable
to help herself, she plots their demise in increasingly gruesome
ways, then hides the endings in a folder in
her office. But one day, Lucinda returns to her cozy cottage
home in the writer's colony of Brimful Coffers to find that her literary creations
want to live -- and are willing to sacrifice Lucinda in order to make that happen.
Convinced she is either losing her mind or that one of the Brimful Coffers
neighbors is playing a terrible joke on her Lucinda tentatively
reports her problems to her novelist friends,
only to find that they too are being threatened by their own
characters. When real life begins to imitate art and members of the town begin
to be killed off, Lucinda must find the killer and restore peace to
both the fictional and real worlds.
Marian Babson has penned an amusing and intriguing tale with her latest creation. The mixture of fantasy and fact and the backstage glimpse into the trials and tribulations of the working mystery novelist are quite funny, and the antics of the authors' mystery characters add an unusual twist to the usual English village cozy. Unusual and entertaining.
--Claire E. White
Return to the March 1998 issue of The IWJ.
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