I’m always happy to buy friend’s books, especially if they’re a good writer. I could go heavy on the sarcasm and stress how bad an author McKenzie is, but I’m not going to do that. I probably won’t spend too many words on this book as it’s only 53 pages, but they’re 53 good pages.
As it says on the outside this is a hard science fiction gonzo-fantasy murder mystery novella…with a talking cat. I mean, what??? It’s crossing genres and mixing them up beautifully. And there’s a cat involved so I’m absolutely in.
Jim Carpenter is a private eye. Business is more than slow, it’s just about stopped. Everyone now has an ethereal entity that floats beside them. Jim Carpenter’s is a cat, a talking cat. If you’ve read McKenzie’s Conversations With My Cat you’ll know that his cats are wiseasses. But he’s been given a case, he has six hours to solve a murder. Everything looks simple except the weapon and bullet have both vanished.
I loved this book. I love how the private eye and his ethereal cat actually manage to work together to solve the case. Jim doesn’t actually like cats and that’s probably why he’s got a cat because cats are ornery like that. So they start off being annoyed at each other, but then make a truce so they can work together.
Alan, the man who gives Jim the case has Baron Samedi as his conscience…Baron Samedi from the James Bond movie ‘Live and Let Die’. I love it, it’s brilliant. I should really have counted the number of references to books and movies in this novella, I’m sure I would have lost track.
I’m finding myself with a problem. I want all of McKenzie’s books. I know I have some of them, but my book case is in such a bad state of disarray I can’t find his books there to put them all together. Let’s compound the issue with my TBR Pile which starts at my head height and goes up three shelves. I don’t remember what I have there as these shelves are double stacked. What I’m suggesting is that there’s a distinct possibility that I’ll buy some of his books multiple times because I’ll forget what I’ve got. And the fact that I want more of the world this novella is set in is not at all problematic
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