Feral Attraction

At the start of Watkins’s enjoyable third Cat Groomer mystery (after The Bengal Identity), Cassie McGlone, owner of Cassie’s Comfy Cats, a grooming and boarding business in Chadwick, N.J., attends a condominium meeting of a suburban enclave whose mostly elderly homeowners are battling over how to deal with a colony of feral cats living in the surrounding woods. While some call for drastic measures, 70-year-old Sabrina Ward seeks a more humane solution. Cassie tries to persuade the condo board to try a trap-neuter-return program. Later, Sabrina is found dead near one of her cat feeding stations. The autopsy lists the cause of death as a heart attack, but Dawn, a friend of both Cassie and Sabrina, refuses to believe this assessment and asks Cassie to help her prove it was murder. The top cat of the feral colony leads Cassie to an important clue and perhaps saves her life, but the detection takes a back seat to information on both domestic and feral cat behavior. This entry is a cat lover’s delight. [em]Agent, Evan Marshall, Evan Marshall Agency. (Oct.) [/em]