Nine Lives and Alibis is number 7 in the Cat Cafe series by Cate Conte, and a first for me. There are quite a few characters and, honestly, that’s the only part that I got lost in the trees. There are no spoilers for previous novels (at least not that I saw), and the author does a great job of weaving description and history throughout the story.
Maddie James is on the events planning committee for Daybreak Harbor as Halloween begins. To assist the events just so happens to be their own local inn with its own cold case ghost story. A famous medium with local connections, Balfour Dempsey, and his equally famous cat, Balfour Jr., come to town to give readings. Maddie’s reporter friend Becky wants to ask him to also solve the two 40-year-old cold cases, one murder and one missing person.
The night of the readings, the inn’s power goes out and the two Balfours have gone missing. Balfour’s mother, Alice, and Maddie go outside to search the grounds and find Balfour’s body over the cliff. There is a chance of a horrible accident, but Maddie doesn’t believe that is the case. Especially when Balfour had given notice that he was retiring from medium work to start working with law enforcement, and inn’s mysteries were first on his list.
The murder takes place about halfway through the story, and I will admit that it had an emotional impact on me. The character Balfour was written as such a sweet man who generally wanted to help. I desperately continued reading to find out who and why would hurt this young man.
I will say that the cats really didn’t have much to do with the mystery. They did find a key piece of evidence, but the majority of the story was Maddie running around and making the connections. That made me wonder if the previous 6 novels are similar or have more feline interaction.
Overall, I rate this novel 4 out of 5 stars.
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