cover image A Cat on a Beach Blanket: An Alice Nestleton Mystery

A Cat on a Beach Blanket: An Alice Nestleton Mystery

Lydia Adamson. Dutton Books, $18.95 (192pp) ISBN 978-0-525-94304-4

The pseudonymous Adamson's 15th Alice Nestleton mystery (after A Cat Under the Mistletoe, 1996) finds the intrepid out-of-work Manhattan actress and inveterate cat sitter on a house-sitting job on Long Island. Alice attends a small local poetry reading after which one the participants is blown to bits in a car-bomb blast. Unnerved and resentful of the unfeeling homicide detective who investigates, Alice begins making friends in the community and trying find out why anyone would kill an amateur poet who plagiarized Edmund Spenser. Her colorful suspects include a purportedly lecherous painter, a gossipy novelist, a writer whose unpublished work is a dumpling cookbook and a trio of eccentric locals. Next, the house Alice is watching is ransacked and then the cookbook writer is shot to death and left with a tiny bell, like the one Alice heard before the first murder, placed at her throat. In her jaunts up and down the beach, Alice has been haunted by the sound of a tinkling bell, but the bell and the cat that wears it prove as elusive as the murderer. Despite Adamson's flair for words and the historical twist behind the murders, the story remains as insubstantial as beach fog. (July)