terpkristin's Reviews > Curiosity Thrilled the Cat

Audiobook from Random House Audio
Narrated by Cassandra Campbell
Length: 10.5 hours

I enjoyed this book. It was a book almost written for me and my silly cat, Oz. It was exactly the type of book I needed after reading a lot of dark and sort of heavy fantasy and science fiction lately, to say nothing of real life. Curiosity Thrilled the Cat was a light murder mystery type book, the type of book I devour like popcorn. The book was fairly mainstream, though did have a fantastical element... The cats in the story have magical powers. The magical powers seem to be related to where the cats are from and possibly the family who used to live there...but a lot of that is only alluded to in this book.

The story is a fairly straight-forward murder mystery. Kathleen, a relative newcomer to a small town in Minnesota, is a librarian at a local library. The library is going through some major renovations, which serves as a secondary and tertiary plot device, though the main thrust is of course the murder. The murder victim is a visiting Composer and Conductor, a man named Easton who was in town to run the annual music festival in the town. Finding herself one of the prime suspects, Kathleen ends up doing some sleuthing on her own, though she is aided by her cats.

Kathleen's cats are Owen and Hercules. Owen seems to have some powers of invisibility, while Hercules can literally walk through walls. Both also seem to understand humans and have a nose (an ear?) for what's going on and finding clues related to the mystery. The cats were necessary helpers for Kathleen solving the mystery, though the sub-plot of where they came from was also developed pretty carefully in this first-in-a-series of books set in the same town with the same people and cats. Kelly leaves some openings for the reader to make assumptions not only about Owen and Hercules but also about the other cats from the same place. Her text also suggests that the storied history of the home (now abandoned) that they were from may hold some magic, too.

All in all, the mystery in the book was fairly predictable. I think I figured out "whodunnit" when Kelly dropped the first major clue--a clue found by Hercules. But even with that, the story was light and fun to read, the story-telling and world-building felt natural, and I looked forward to hearing how Kathleen finally put all the pieces together. Slightly less elegant was one of the secondary story lines, a sub-plot where the contractor working on the renovations at the library wanted to chase Kathleen away so that his girlfriend(?), the former head librarian, could resume the post that she'd quit. The secondary story didn't make much sense in the context of this book, but may play a role in the larger plot of the series.

Cassandra Campbell's narration was fantastic. She's done the narration for many books with female leads, and it's no wonder why. Being a woman, her voice is a natural fit for the narration, unlike when some men do narration for mainly female roles and it feels forced or that they're trying to use a different tone for a "woman's voice." She didn't try to use a different tone for the male voices, which was a good thing. It felt like she was reading the story to me and made it easy to listen to. I'm looking forward to listening to the next book in the series, which Campbell also narrates. What can I say? I'm kind of a crazy cat lady myself (with only one feral cat, thank you very much), and I'm a sucker for a fun murder mystery...