It is with a heavy heart that I conclude that I no longer recognize Moose County. I came to this realization after muddling through a disconcerting second chapter of The Cat Who Smelled a Rat, in which I learned that Pickax City, 400 miles north of everywhere, population 3,000, had acquired a dermatology clinic. After flailing bewildered through a morass of unfamiliar, nondescript characters in odd or uninvolving situations, the only thing that cheered me was a visit to Edd's Editions. The rest of Pickax may as well be a foreign land, but there's Edd, still himself, still cheerfully plugging away in his little corner of comfort in the world that time mercifully forgot. We step into Edd's shop, and for a while, everything is right again - we're back home. But home is ripped from us shortly afterward, and I am decisively disconnected.
The Cat Who Smelled a Rat opens in late October, with Moose County in danger of being consumed either in flame from out-of-control local wildfires or in the ten-foot snowdrifts of the imminent (but, for the tinderbox of a county, not soon enough in coming) Big One. Qwill settles into his winter digs at Indian Village, next to not only Polly but new neighbor Kirt Nightingale, the squirrelly rare book-dealer introduced in Robbed a Bank. Trouble erupts before long, though not where one would expect - Eddington Smith is found dead in his shop from an apparent heart attack, and his beloved bookshop burns to the ground only days after. More, varied murder and mayhem ensues, including a murder on the firefighting lines, a couple of mysterious disappearances, and a suspicious accident at the local curling club. (I'm a bit ill at ease with how much to reveal in this review and what can be considered a spoiler; Putnam's PR department has once again detailed events that occur three-quarters way through the book in its promotional material.)
All of this is at once more and less than (and, yes, in some cases, exactly what) it seems. Unlike, say, Saw Stars, I doubt anyone can fault Smelled a Rat for lack of sheer criminal activity - there's a bunch of stuff, intriguing at the time, going on throughout the novel in many different arenas. But it would be nice if there were a more intricate plot at work behind the scenes - an ever-enlargening web of intrigue, a grand master plan or a gradual progression - a snowballing, if you will - of events to propel the felonious goings-on; as it is, the mystery at the core of the crimes is rather facile and flat.
What's frustrating is that this had a chance at being an excellent mystery. The proper ingredients - long-buried family secrets, ordinary Pickax folk dragged into a world of crime out of loyalty, friendship, or a desire not to rock the boat - were present to create a still-waters-run-deep small-town saga in the vein of Sniffed Glue or Went Underground, and it was smart to center the crime plot around characters long-established in the series but never really directly within its frame of action. Had this plot been used in one of the older books - say, pre-Lived High - that knew how to cook a recipe like this, we might've really had something. But the (several) potentially interesting plotlines with which we are presented are scattered to the four winds - broken off and resumed in fits and starts, forgotten by the book's half-way mark, written off in the last chapter, never fleshed out. We learn next to nothing about the mental processes of the people involved with and affected by these affairs - the story is concerned only with end results, wasting so many fine opportunities to get readers invested in the story. An earnest attempt at some sort of unity in the book - a tauter narrative for the mystery, a more lucid structure, and enough care granted its storylines to properly nourish and resolve them - would've done wonders in the way of depth and emotional attachment.
There is a theme of sorts - the discard of the old in favor of the new. That's the ostensible crime of the villains, but the heroes and townsfolk (and author) do quite a fine job of it themselves. There is much emphasis, where there was none before, on how old Eddington was. A set of well-loved historical murals which have graced the walls of the Pickax post office for decades are introduced - only to be torn down. Old friends in the supporting cast are barely glimpsed, kicked to the curb in favor of shoving new, shallow characters in our faces - uninspiring blind historian Burgess Campbell, irritating housewife-artist Misty Morghan, whose only function in the story seems to be to smugly scoff at local customs and names and point out who's had plastic surgery, and accountant Jeffa Young, whose discourses on astrology and metaphysics were delivered with so much more flair by Mildred Riker. This leads to the book's second major problem - what the old is being replaced with does not inspire confidence, and so much of the old is being replaced or ignored that, as I lamented at the start of this review, what's left doesn't really resemble Moose County anymore.
Most of the small-town material - the enjoyable small-town material (among it a visit to a silent auction and a haiku contest) - is the equivalent of Cat Who... Chinese food - good going down, but it'll leave you hungry for something more substantial an hour later. (This is probably at least partially due to the fact that, as in the mystery, the narrative thread whips through people, places, and happenings so quickly that it's like we're on a fast-moving tour through Moose County with no guide; one new to the series might have serious trouble keeping track of what's going on.) Qwilleran is pretty much a non-factor here. He still has a great deal of jerkiness left in him from Robbed a Bank but isn't as aggressive a jerk. He's still not the fine fellow I met way back in Could Read Backwards, and I found him pretty insufferable at times. Oddly, Polly almost takes over Qwilleran's old role of the down-to-earth, honest anchor of the story; I've never been a particular friend or foe of Polly, but, for me, she was by far the most sensible and on-her-toes person in the cast. If you've been uneasy with the character in the past, I think you might like her here. The cats - I can't recall a memorable scene with them offhand.
My review is a bit listless and meandering, I know. It was that way with me reading the book, too - my progress was uncertain and sporatic, and I can say in complete frankness that I have never been like that with a Cat Who... book before. Objectively, I suppose it wasn't all that bad, but it was just hard for me to summon up much interest in this tale. After all, I don't know the people in it.
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