August 27, 1999
The Cat Who Sang for the Birds
Lilian Jackson Braun

Had trouble focusing on this one. Maybe I just wasn’t in the right mood.

Someone has burned up an old country woman in her rickety barn of a house, and Qwill soon learns of a scam that led the old lady to sell off a huge portion of her land for a fraction of its worth. This is all connected somehow to the new art gallery on the other side of the road, where a young, sad woman sits in a back room painting pictures of butterflies and keeping company with a rude, cursing parrot. When Qwill sees the bruises on her arms and suspects her bartender boyfriend with whom she lives, inexplicably, in the very expensive Indian Village condos, he feels for her and of course, gets that suspicious otherworldly tugging sensation in his mustache. Then the girl disappears, an turns up dead in the river. The bartender and a scheming local political / restauranteur get their comeuppance for the scam, the old lady’s death, and the girl’s death.

The title comes from – I guess – the fact that Koko chats animatedly with a small flock of birds every morning. Qwill likes to pack the cats and some goodies in a tote bag and take them out to the gazebo for lunch, which sounds really good right now… ( )

myst