Basically, Saw Stars compounds the errors of its near-equally (but, nigh-unbelievably if you've read either, not as quite as) disappointing forebears, Tailed a Thief and Sang for the Birds. The plot is stuck in neutral. There's no strong narrative. The story and its development are unfocused. It is, more than anything, the lack of focus that deals the story its death blow - and yet, strangely, it was the very device that, for a while, blinded me from realizing how seriously the tale was flawed. The story wouldn't concentrate, so I couldn't. I kept waiting, reserving judgment on it, for some plot development (like the much-delayed death of Mary Coggin in Sang for the Birds) to galvanize the story and get everyone down to business. It never came. The book is, quite simply, incoherent.
Saw Stars just doesn't know what it wants to be about. Publicity releases touted a UFO theme. Does the book deliver? Well, it flirts with the subject, it dutifully has the characters mention them off and on, but, overall - not really. It chatters a bit about them, as if to kill time and pages, without truly saying anything about them. That's characteristic of most of the book's sub-plots, really; aimless diversions meant to keep everyone occupied, with no cohesion, point, or payoff. Saw Stars presents our hero with some potentially interesting situations (riding a recumbent bike in the Independence Day parade, calling a dogcart race), but, instead of taking these scenarios and building on them with interesting twists or developments, it just has Qwilleran show up, do his job, and go home, as if his mere presence at such esoteric events is intrinsically amusing. It isn't, and the scenes of Qwill's daily life in Moose County are lifeless as a result. To compensate, Braun throws a lot of new material at us - the tiny fishing burg of Fishport, Mooseville's "Great Dune", the integration of Moose County and Lockmaster County with until-now-unheard-of Bixby County into a "tri-county area", and so forth. I have an objection to the abrupt introduction of of new, important places. Mooseville and Moose County have been around for seventeen books now. If, say, the Great Dune was so prominent in Mooseville and Moose County, such an integral part of the landscape and local history, why haven't we heard of it before? The pragmatic answer, of course, is simple - Braun hadn't conceptualized them until just this book and invented them for the sake of convenience, in an attempt to substitute pseudo-novelty for good, interesting material. It amounts to character and place inflation. We don't need more; we need to have better handling of what we already have.
There was potential, in all this hodgepodge, for Braun to pull out, if not a great Cat Who... book, then at least a halfway decent one. In the absolute abstract, Tess Bunker, Wetherby Goode's corvidologist cousin, was cute in her obsession with crows and her overbearing attachment to Qwill, and capable Deputy Greenleaf distinguishes herself with her no-nonsense, get-the-job-done attitude (her actions to quiet down the rowdy entrants in the parade provide the one great scene in the book) and her status as seemingly the only character in Moose County who doesn't fawn over Qwilleran - she likes and respects him, but she doesn't let his charm soften her defenses or get in the way of her duties on the job. The development of Derek Cuttlebrink and Elizabeth Cage's relationship and their respective characters - how they've matured and become more responsible together - was a nice touch. Ernie, the successful, devoted chef, sophisticated and level-headed yet amiable and down-to-earth, who loves her career and art, forms a bond with Derek, and is forced to make some desperate choices, could've been one of Braun's best supporting characters to date - yet we hardly (if ever - we just hear her voice off-page from the kitchen of her restaurant, if memory serves) meet her "personally", and Braun shuffles any further mention of her off to third-party references and hearsay. Granted, what we gleam of Ernie's character is fascinating, but it's a pure crime to create such an interesting person and not have her active in the story (particularly in one as hurting for good ideas as this one). Yum Yum's sweet attachment to a Siamese stuffed toy is cute, but never furthered (we only get one scene concerning it, and nothing about Koko's reaction or the ridiculous problems that a cat trying to mother a cloth kitten would encounter), and we get flashes of Braun's sharp insight into human nature and common experience (anybody can relate when Qwilleran, while being regaled by amateur ufologist Bushy Bushland's outlandish tales of flying saucer exploits, smiles and nods and thinks to himself, "Here I am in the middle of a lake with a crazy guy! Watch it!"), but they're not supported by consistently strong characterization. The herd mentality of Moose County's native population and their devout belief in UFOs - plus the sinister, mysterious happenings near the crafts' supposed "landing sites" to validate and stoke their faith - could've lead to a fine plotline about widespread UFO hysteria. The offhand comment about Amanda Goodwinter, with her (much-missed) vinegary temperament, running for mayor, if expanded into an entire story, could've provided nearly enough fodder to carry the book itself. And the chaotic Fourth of July parade was ripe for mayhem - indeed, the entire scene at the staging area seemed to be building towards such a climax - but Braun wasted the opportunity. She wastes all these opportunities. Our author has the tools at hand to craft something passable, but she refuses to use them, and the novel as a whole is too much of a mess for any worthwhile individual elements to shine through.
Another slight but significant observation: I saw more pop-culture references here. Ann Landers, fax machines, Roswell, e-mail, the Hubble telescope - many more than in any other previous installment (where the closest we got to such stuff was a veiled reference to a black-and-white feline looking like "the White House cat", dateless in its ambiguity). This should not be. This jars. Moose County exists as a pristine, timeless slice of quaint, close-knit rural Americana, outside the hubbub of modern culture and society. That's its charm. To have Moose County so in contact with the ruder, crasser outside world, and thus so defilable and corruptable by all its imperfections and encumbrances, is a gross tactical error. One could make the argument, of course, that since the story is centered around a renovation-obsessed Mooseville in the summer and thus mired in resort-town sensibilities, there isn't much of an opportunity to cultivate that small-town feeling in the first place, but, then again, Saw Stars probably never had a chance to develop any sense of setting whatsoever, due, again, to the herky-jerky narrative.
There is no mystery. No, I'm not saying that there's a BAD mystery - I am saying that there is NO mystery. There are two suspicious deaths. The events behind one are entirely divulged in a giftish confession scene, after any chance of ever prosecuting the perpetrator has vanished. The other, it turns out, isn't a mystery at all; the victim died of natural causes. Oops. Not that it matters anyhow, but Qwilleran doesn't do any investigation - he doesn't even seem interested or curious. Neither does Koko, despite attempts to pin a couple of his antics on psychic premontions; the supposed connection between the cat's actions and their supposed import and relevance is so tenuous it's laughable and lame. And the event that constitutes the climax of the novel, which is completely unrelated to the un-mystery, is so jaw-droppingly unbelievable that Braun could not have possibly written it while she was sober.
Perhaps that's the best metaphor with what's going on with Stars - the whole novel's drunk, a disjointed, babbling mess that thinks it's a grand old time but is too unintelligible to entertain anybody. It adds nothing to the series, and there's really no reason why it should've been written at all.
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