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The Cats That Surfed The Web (2013)

by Karen Anne Golden(Favorite Author)

3.69 of 5 Votes: 1

ISBN

1494253240 (ISBN13: 9781494253240)

languge

English

genre

Horror

publisher

CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform

series

The Cats That

review 1: This was a Kindle lending library selection. I do like cozy murder mysteries and this fit right in that category. Katherine learns she is the beneficiary of her aunts will as long as she spends one year in the house and takes care of her aunt's cat. The rest would be giving too much away.The book was fine. I light read. Fairly predictable if you read a lot of this type of mystery. It did remind me a bit of the Cat who series. I've read all of those!
review 2: The Cats That Surfed the WebBy Karen Anne GoldenThis is the first entry in “The Cats That” series. The author is an Indiana native who states, on her Amazon author page, that she has always lived in the Tippecanoe County area. I would guess then, that it makes perfect sense that her novel would be se... moret in a small town in the west central part of the state. Second book in a row where an author has used the old writers’ rule of “write what you know” to her best advantage.The action picks up with the main character, Katherine Kendall, in New York City, heading to a job that she obviously no longer loves. Her morning is not going well, and that doesn’t seem to improve as she arrives at her office. There she receives a phone call from an Indiana lawyer advising her that her great aunt, whom she has never met, has passed away, leaving the majority of her sizeable estate (excess of 44 million) to Katherine, provided she moves to Indiana, occupies the great aunt’s home and cares for her cat for one year. Katherine, who owns 3 Siamese cats of her own, is intrigued (yeah, who wouldn’t be intrigued by the idea of 44 million dollars?), and travels to Indiana to check things out. She finds that her great aunt lived in a very large Victorian type home, which was well kept up, full of wonderful antique furnishings. She falls in love with Abigail, her aunt’s Abyssinian cat, immediately, and decides to take the offer and transplant herself and her three cats, Scout, Lilac and Iris, to Indiana. As it turns out, it is a good decision, as when she returns to NYC to turn in her two weeks’ notice at work, she is fired before she can resign (another bonus – termination settlement. This character certainly has a money-finding gene). Her friend, Colleen accompanies Katherine to Indiana to help her get moved in and settled. It is during that one-week stay that the novel’s action really picks up. To be frank, most of the first half of the book reads like a gal-pal adventure. Fun reading, and certainly useful for getting to know the major players in the story, but it isn’t until about 59% through the novel (yep, reading it on my Kindle) that the mystery heats up. But from there it runs at breakneck speed with lots of intrigue and speculation, two murders, plus an injured cat.I liked the author’s writing style. The action flows along pretty smoothly. Very easy to read and get into the storyline. It was a quick read, I started the book late on the 26th and finished it this a.m., the 28th, reading only for a bit before bed and in the early mornings. Her characterizations were good. I knew some background on the characters, and certainly knew who to like and who to be suspicious of. I might have liked a little deeper characterizations, but as this is the first in a series, I felt there was room for more development in ensuing novels. The mystery was a fun one. Pretty uncomplicated, but with enough intrigue to keep one reading and perhaps doing a bit of second guessing on one’s suspicions. And, of course, because there were cats involved, I was charmed from the get go. The book was very well edited and proofed. Something that I always look for and that will earn a star of its own if well done! I think I did see one misspelling, but I didn’t note it down so it obviously didn’t stop my progress with the story! There were no grammatical errors noted, and only one progress stopper, which, upon further reading, was cleared up, so I’m still happy. Star earned. :-)So, yes, I thoroughly enjoyed the novel and plan to read the two now-existing novels in the series as well. That doesn’t mean I didn’t find things I wasn’t so happy about, I did. This is the author’s first novel (and for lots of reasons – she lives where I do, the setting is in Indiana, she obviously knows and likes cats, and I’m happy to find a series that might be able to replace Braun’s “The Cat Who” series – I WANT to like this series) so I’m willing to overlook some of them, hoping these things improve as the series continues. I did have a few problems with some of the descriptions the author used. Things like: the waitress in a hotel which, according to one of the characters, was rated #1 in the state for one of its specialties, who didn’t know what a Cabernet wine was. Believe me, I grew up in a town as small or smaller than the one described in the book (and more in the boonies) and I knew what a cabernet was from the time I was old enough to know the difference between Mogen David and the real stuff (yeah, yeah, I know Mogen David is real wine). I’m betting you could walk into any restaurant that serves alcohol in any part of Indiana, and even if they didn’t stock it, the wait staff would all know what a Cabernet was. Would they know the difference between a Cabernet Sauvignon and a Cabernet Franc or a Cabernet blanc? Maybe not so much, but the general wine category would be known. Another example was, when investigating, the police chief states that the main character should follow his orders because before being named police chief in Erie he worked as a detective “in the city” and knew what he was doing. Yeah, because the police in small towns in Indiana are clueless. Gimme a break! Indiana tends to have a hick reputation that is decidedly undeserved. Yes, there is a lot of agriculture in the state. But as Monticello’s Indiana Beach slogan states, “there is more than corn in Indiana.” There is also a lot of manufacturing, big name manufacturing: Alcoa, Caterpillar, Subaru, Eli Lilly, to name just a few., plus multiple universities, some of which are known worldwide: Notre Dame, Purdue, Indiana University, plus others that have gained in recognition in recent years, like Ball State, Indiana State, IUPUI and others. I guess I disliked these inferences that somehow Indiana residents, especially those in small towns, are unsophisticated and clueless about all that fancy stuff that big city dwellers evidently known instinctively. Yep, this alone knocked one star off my rating.Also – why 44 million? Seems sort of excessive, to me. Surely, a lesser amount, say a meager 10 or 15 million would have been enough! I guess in these days of 100 million dollar lottery wins, 44 seemed like a drop in the bucket? I wasn’t thrilled with the solution to the case – a little too cozy a cozy mystery for me. As the main characters (Katherine, her friend Colleen, and the lawyer, Mark Dunn) are figuring it out as they sit in Katherine’s parlor and discuss events, the Police Chief arrives and tells them the perpetrator has confessed). Although the mystery has plenty of mayhem in it, that ending was a little too bland, a little too easy, for my tastes (let’s remember that I’m a fan of the Jack Daniels series, which is pretty graphically violent and bloody)I also wanted to see more investigation into the deaths of the great aunt and housekeeper. Those felt like loose ends to me. Lastly, the novel is set in the fictitious town of Erie, Indiana (no, not the Eerie, Indiana of the short-lived TV series), which the author seems to have set somewhere off I-74 about an hour and a half from Indianapolis near the Illinois border. The author lives in the same county as I do, Tippecanoe, and I’m about an hour north of Indianapolis along I-65. I-74 runs south of Tippecanoe County, just barely north and almost straight west out of Indy, toward Champaign, Illinois. The author describes it as “kind of to the northwest and sort of close to the Illinois border.” Erie is also described as receiving a lot of snow in the winter (well, we did during the winter of 2013/14, but otherwise, it’s hit and miss for 10-12 inch snows as the author describes) and the location seems just a bit south (almost west central more than northwest IN) for Lake effect snow. However, the weather descriptions of the novel’s timeline (cold with snow devolving into rain and sleet one day, then heavy snow a few days later) do match the “Don’t like the weather -- wait a minute” style of much of Indiana weather, winter or summer, so I’m relatively happy to buy into the descriptions. In the end, I enjoyed the book and thought it was a very nice first effort. I look forward to obtaining and devouring the next two books in the series. less

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