The mystery is immediately established; longtime friend Iris Cobb calls Qwilleran one night from her post at the Goodwinter Farmhouse Museum, scared out of her wits from persistent ghostly noises and moans. Qwill rushes to drive her to a safe haven, but Iris has already suffered a fatal heart attack when he arrives. Doctors blame poor health, but a few suspicious details - all the lights in the farmhouse had been turned off when Iris was found; why would she choose to sit in the dark when she felt scared and in danger? - lead Qwilleran to suspect a second party and take up temporary residence in the museum to follow through.
The criminal's identity is evident enough, I suppose, if you're familiar with Cat Who... cliches; it's the motive that's such a conundrum, and the construction of both the reason and its revelation equals Braun's work in the city episodes. The roots lie in the shady circumstances of the death of Moose County founding father and legendary villain Ephraim Goodwinter in 1904, a meaty, involving drama in itself that ties together beautifully with the events in the present. This is the only instance when the Ye Venerable History of Pickax element has truly struck a chord with me; it's not just a gimmick, some archaic names conjured up from old Picayune archives to supply Moose County with an artificially colorful past. The 1904 events are given a tangible, engrossing narrative with a believable cast and motives, and it truly works, in both the mechanics of the present mystery and the mood of the novel.
The melancholic tone and pensiveness of the book, though, override the mystery plot somewhat. We have more on Moose County's early mining tragedies, the wholesale slaughter of farm animals, an abusive husband and a broken family, and, of course, the death of kind, loving Iris Cobb, one of the series's most endearing, enduring characters. We are dealing with undeniably somber material here, which may throw some readers (like it did me at first), given Moose County's generally cheery, folksy atmosphere. Make no mistake, however - through this sadness, we're getting to the heart of this little world in which we've become so involved; we see a little bit of why these folks act the way they do, and what some of them are willing to do to preserve the status quo. The whole book is rich with the remembrance and the lingering memory of those past (the true "ghosts" of the title), and it comes off as more "literary" than the other installments - a meditation on the value we place on human relationships and steadfast elements in our lives and how we sometimes take these things for granted, the lengths to which we go to preserve them when we realize they're threatened, and the regret that lingers when they're gone.
Like Qwilleran's beloved Shakespearean drama, though, there's suitable comic relief on hand to alleviate the heaviness. Braun's supplied us with memorable chuckles like our hero's choplogic conversations with Baby Boswell, the two-and-a-half year-old child next door ("What kind of car do you drive?" "I don't have a car." "Why not?" "I'm too little." "Why don't you grow up?") and octa/nonagenarian newlyweds Rhoda Finney and Homer Tibbitt's equally nonsensical marital spats (they bicker, all right, but one's ears don't always quite correctly interpret what the other's mouth is saying, so the free-association arguments end up like a particularly twisted round of the child's game Telephone). And, of course, Qwilleran's feline nemesis Bootsie is introduced, and Qwill's whole cat-sitting adventure, with its hilarious slapstick climax, provides one of the series's great comic moments, right up there with the Tipsy look-alike contest, Qwill's interrupted phone conversation with Fran Unger, the Wudjus lunch at the Petrified Bagel, and the all-time classic Odd-Bunsen-on-the-balconies bit. Back to the Boswells, though - I do appreciate the way Qwilleran does eventually come around to Baby and her mother despite his initial misgivings. Here, we learn, is perhaps the reason why Qwilleran is so well-liked; he's the only resident of Moose County willing to look past the labels of "native" and "outsider", "acceptable" and "not" to get to know the individual. (We get an excellent example of the contrast between the two attitudes in a couple of lines placed nearly side-by-side in a scene where Qwill phones for medical help for Baby; Qwilleran touchingly and pityingly notes that the child's injured neck is "hardly bigger than Koko's", while Dr. Halifax's first concern seems to be not for her health, but for the fact that Boswell isn't a "Moose County name".)
So, to summarize - The Cat Who Talked to Ghosts is a bit off-model from the Cat Who... archetype. But the genuine, heart-felt human element and the thoughtful examination of the basic elements that make the series special make it a treasure for anyone attached to Braun's universe.
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