Mystery Notes

Ailurophiles will want to snuggle up to British veteran Marian Babson's latest comic feline cozy, The Cat Who Wasn't a Dog. A trip to the taxidermist by Dame Cecile Savoy to get her late Pekinese stuffed leads to a kooky case involving murder, arson and kidnapping. (St. Martin's Minotaur/Dunne, $22.95 208p ISBN 0-312-28497-7)

In Charlaine Harris's Poppy Done to Death: An Aurora Teagarden Mystery, the eighth in this lively cozy series after Last Scene Alive (Forecasts, July 29, 2002), the smalltown librarian looks into a murder too close to home—that of her stepsister-in-law. A particular highlight here is Aurora's local book discussion group, the Uppity Women. (St. Martin's Minotaur, $22.95 240p ISBN 0-312-27764-4)

Five Star rolls out two crime novels with 1940s Southwest settings: Tricia Allen's sequel to Texas Weather (2000), A Well-Respected Dead Man, in which ex-prosecutor David Weather's investigation into a gambling kingpin's death gets him into trouble with the mob ($25.95 310p ISBN 0-7862-5441-6), and Surviving Wisdom, by Ken Hodgson (Lone Survivor), in which Pat Gunn torches his home, the Starlight Theatre, for the insurance money, setting the stage for murder and a deadly manhunt ($25.95 212p -5437-8). The same publisher also offers Catherine Dain's Dreams of Jeannie and Other Stories, which collects 11 tales featuring such favorite sleuths, psychic and otherwise, as Freddie O'Neal, Mariana Morgan and Faith Cassidy. ($25.95 204p -5440-8)