The Rules and... (Part 1B)


Warning!
 The following piece contains major spoilers for The Cat Who Saw Red, The Cat Who Played Brahms, The Cat Who Played Post Office, and The Cat Who Knes Shakespeare! There are in-document hypertext links to help you get around, but if you haven't read all of those books yet, proceed with caution!

Well, since no one's complained (or complimented or commented at all, for that matter) about the Rules analyses, shall we continue?

The Cat Who Saw Red
The Cat Who Played Brahms
The Cat Who Played Post Office
The Cat Who Knew Shakespeare

The Cat Who Saw Red

  1. Rules #1 and #2 are closely intertwined in The Cat Who Saw Red, so let me address them jointly.

    The mystery was not a gimme. Yes, there was no doubt in the reader's mind as to the fact that a murder was committed and the murderer's identity. But evidence, exact motive, and modi operandi were yet to be ascertained (and, on a technical level, the killer did do a clever job of covering up his crimes - he only got a little overzealous in the end - and the deduction of what was and wasn't done when and why from the few clues at hand was adroitly executed.) Plus...there were other matters to be taken into consideration as well.

    Dan killed Joy. The readers knew that all along. So did Qwilleran, really - that was the problem. No, not a problem in the sense of making the investigation too easy - a problem in the sense that it made one of the toughest - perhaps the toughest - crimes that Qwilleran has ever gotten involved in, due to his past relationship with Joy.

    Again, Qwilleran knew, deep down, that Joy was dead and Dan killed her. But he rails against accepting the reality of that fact. Oh, he doesn't slack off his duties, he indeed pursues the trail aggressively and doggedly - but he refuses to believe the obvious conclusions waiting to be drawn. finally overcoming that - with great resistance and anguish, as is so deftly illustrated in scenes where Qwill sadly, defeatedly turns away when he sees Dan burning Joy's clothing in the kiln through the peephole in his apartment wall or smashes the blood-red vase Dan gave him in pure horror and anger after learning of its origins.

    Were obstacles overcome? Most definitely - at a great emotional cost to our hero. True, the primary murder victim was not a likable person. That does not matter in this case. The crime's impact on our hero does. If you are invested in Qwilleran, you have an interest in this mystery. Rule #1 obeyed...

  2. ...and Rule #2 obeyed.

  3. Koko did his death dance around the pottery book, which got Qwilleran's moustache twitching enough to get him to finally read it and recognize the information within as crucial to the investigation (it is, indeed, the bit gleamed from the book about the old Chinese practice of cremating small animals in their kilns to give their pots a brilliant red color that gets his dander up enough to go to Robert Maus with his suspicions). He also shows inordinate interest (tries to burrow into, actually) the hatch where Willaim's body was buried during his visit to Dan's pottery. If you want to go even further, you could interpret, as Qwilleran did, his "pb" on the typewriter as a signal that William was killed by having his drink spiked with lead ("Pb" being the periodic symbol for the element lead), though this was an oblique clue at best, considering at that point that we didn't even know for certain if William was dead, much less if he had even gone to Dan's or had a drink. But the previous two clues (plus the "30" for extra credit) will suffice. Koko's contributions to the investigation this time around were a tad downplayed; a wise decision, since any excessive attention on Koko's extrasensory talents would've detracted and distracted from the book's emotional core and true, worthy focus, Qwilleran's inner struggle. Rule #3 obeyed.

  4. I'm quite partial to the folks over at Maus Haus; they really did seem like a family - everybody was interesting and nobody seemed out-of-place. Max Sorrel - thoroughly decent bear of a restaurant owner estimable for the pride he takes in his establishment. Hixie Rice - funny, good-natured girl who, though she's made a few wrong choices in her life, still has a good heart. Charlotte Roop, uptight matron with the sort of moral indignance (not malevolence) that poses no real threat to anyone and keeps the cast in balance and check. Rosemary Whiting - finally, a quiet, non-flashy, down-to-earth, mature Qwill girl.
    Robert Maus, with his pseudo-pensive, pseudo-dramatic, drawn-out mid-sentence pauses and culinary niggardliness, was an amusing grand master of his boarding house's nuttiness. Mrs. Marron's at first-inexplicable then, with all the facts brought to light, strangely merciful behavior regarding Koko and Yum Yum's temporary disappearance, against the backdrop of her own tale of loss, greatly enriched Saw Red's mood - and the way everybody came to her support after learning the whole story was touching (woudl they be doing this in Moose County? No - she'd be pigeonholed as a nutcase in five minutes on the Pickax grapevine and relegated to social ostracism). And I loved William for the time he was "on-stage", with his hero-admiration of Qwilleran and his entertaining combination of semi-level-headedness and part-semi-professional, part-impish nosiness, and his conspiratorial lunch with Qwill at the Petrified Bagel was a classic. His character also provided an interesting element to the tale, in that Qwilleran notes at several points in the story that William acts as a younger version of himself (that is, Qwilleran). In view of such, William's eventual fate and its import (symbolic and otherwise), when coupled with the death of Qwill's childhood sweetheart and the "closure" of his past and youthful idealism, adds potency to the Rule #1 factor.
    As a result, we have the most cohesive, supposting cast in a Cat Who... book to date. Rule #4 obeyed beautifully.
    And, of course, we have Joy and Dan. But let's save them for Rule #5...

  5. Well, Saw Red could be viewed as one big Qwilleran bildungsroman, couldn't it? Between my paeans to Braun's subtle, effective heartbreaking Qwilleran characterization moments in my review, the Top 101 list, and the above Rule #1 discussion, I could just declare Rule #5 as marvellously obeyed as all the others here right now, but I'd like to take a little more time to admire the characterization of Joy and Dan.
    To unravel the mystery, Qwilleran must retrace the missteps of Joy and Dan's lives - to which he is initially oblivious; all he knows is that he has his "same old Joy" back. But it is that "same old Joy" that presents the problem; his girlfriend has changed or matured little from her adolescence, still acting first and thinking later, with a tenuous hold at best on the correlation between actions and consequences. She married a (very wrong) man for very weak to nonexistent reasons, and is leaving him for even weaker ones ("I don't know. It's just because...well, I'm me and he's himself"). Not that there's lack of grounds for abandoning the marriage - observe the couple for five minutes, their constant bickering and Dan's pointed, sadistic comments about such personal subjects as the death of Joy's cat and her fear of drowning meant just to hurt and torture her and one cannot help but to come to the conclusion that this is a poisonous, caustic relationship - but Joy takes none of them seriously; the woman is utterly oblivious to the dangerous situation she's put herself in, and her thoughtless capriciousness eventually does her in.
    And Dan. Dan, I believe, is a most uncommon villain, in retrospect not so much evil as pitiful whose actions were driven by weakness more than anything else - a small, pathetic man once given a taste of success and fame but who had it prematurely revoked and was left instead with a misplaced sense of self-importance from the experience, who is desperately clinging to his past glories to justify that feeling, and who is now threatened by his wife's imminent fame, which threatens to take even that away from him; one can be ignored for only so long without self-destructing - especially "one" as egomaniacal as Dan. With Saw Red, Braun returns to Backwards's roots with a rich mystery whose solution is entwined and entrenched in the players' psyches, supremely satisfying in its intelligent analysis and - as I've said before, a rare, unique, and, when done as well as in Red immensely rewarding trait for a genre dominated by glorified logic problems - literary quality. Beautiful. Rule #5 obeyed.

The Cat Who Saw Red totals 5 out of 5. It's one of the best of the series.


The Cat Who Played Brahms

  1. On the surface, Brahms looks promisingly compliant here, as the death of Aunt Fanny - the closest thing, besides the cats, that Qwilleran had to family and an engaging character in her own right - certainly should provide sufficient cause for reader concern. The narrative, however, quickly jettisons that plot thread's potential - upon hearing the bad news, Qwilleran seems surprised but otherwise not moved in the least (and the possibility of foul play barely crosses our professionally-suspicious reporter's mind), and its resolution, despite the poignancy of Tom's taped confession, was an afterthought narrative-wise. Save for its resultant impact on Qwilleran's lifestyle, the death is practically a non-event, curiously brushed off in favor of the murky prisoner-ferrying scheme and the murder of Buck Dunfield, whom we barely knew and who barely proved interesting in his one scene alive. Admittedly, the prison scam had some potential for intrigue - most apparent in Qwilleran's nicely gloomy-murky-dumpy-uneasy-ominous fishing trip and in the "Litlle White Lies" tape - but the whole enterprise never really took off; it just remained on the level of some backwoods scandal. And, as in The Cat Who Turned On and Off, we have victims who never would've gotten killed had they not been committing high crimes in the process in the first place. Yes, yes, I know - it was still wrong to kill the prisoners. But stupidity and greedy self-interest dull sympathy.
    And speaking of stupidity, greed, and self-interest - to top it all off, Roger MacGillivray hints at the end of the book that the whole scheme was common knowledge in the county - that nobody wanted to turn in Stanley and company because it's considered "bad form" in the country to snitch on one of one's own. Come again? Besides all the moral and social-responsibility issues raised, didn't anybody ever stop to think that Moose County's permissiveness towards the gang's essential mass-murdering might embolden - evidenced the murder of the former police chief, indeed had emboldened - them to commit further, more indiscriminate, less socially-acceptable crimes? Another damper on the Rule #1 factor. Had Brahms taken more pause for the death of Aunt Fanny, it would've squeaked by here. Instead, all I can say is - Rule #1 disobeyed.

  2. Shades of On and Off again, in which Qwilleran had to match up bootprints, dented car fenders, and methods of folding paper currency to get his man. Here, Qwilleran has to match up voices, facial wounds, and money clips to get his man. This is bad. Worse than that, it's cheap. Having the perpetrator leave behind a figurative "glass slipper" and the sleuth just race around town and country until he finds out whom it fits demands no deduction on the part of the sleuth or the reader - robbing the mystery of most - if not all - of its strength. With any sort of independent logical reasoning no longer a factor in the investigation, we're left with just legwork - and any brainless schmo off the street can do legwork. And Qwilleran comes up nigh-empty even in that area, as it's Koko who does bloodies Stanley when he breaks into the cabin and the death dance around the turkey, leading Qwilleran to grave suspicions concerning its place of origin, and Rosemary - Rosemary! - who identifies the owner of the money clip in the cabin - which Qwilleran wouldn't have found had Koko not batted his toy underneath the sofa and the cats not started yowling for Qwill to get it and clean out under the sofa. One could excuse Qwilleran by saying that he was on vacation and that he was mentally preoccupied with dealing with the hassles of country folks and life, but Rules is Rules. Rule #2 disobeyed.

  3. In light of Koko's contributions to the case as stated above, I have to give him credit. I'm a tad reluctant to do so in this case, since this was a rather tame mystery, but the fact remains that the case never would've been solved without his help. A "sure, fine, whatever" on Rule #3.

  4. Another rule where Brahms should be a gimme but in which close inspection brings disappointment. After all, Brahms features the first appearance of so many of the Pickax characters to whom we've grown so attached, so it should pass this rule with ease, right? I might note, however, that, in many cases, these are not the folks we know and love from the later Moose County books. Junior Goodwinter, in his few short scenes, is just a one-dimensional golly-gee bug-eyed kid, with none of the sense of responsibility or unadorned earnestness and good-heartedness that more him deeper and so likable later on. Roger MacGillivray, Qwill's dependable companion later on, is a complete unctuous, greedy, deceptive dastard here whose big scene in the book is where he comes over to sulk and berate Qwilleran for inheriting Fanny's money and stealing his undersea-treasure-hunting grant bucks. Mildred is...pleasant, but pleasant doesn't carry books, and without the investment we have in her in later volumes, it's hard to get attached to her. (I might note that Mildred doesn't seem as sharp here, either, but then, losing her lover and husband within a short span of time would pose a considerable drain on one's faculties.) And I can't stand Melinda, Moose County's own "don't hate me because I'm beautiful" spokesdoctor. (To quote a famous retort to this, ok, how about we hate you because you're obnoxious?) Aunt Fanny half-carries the day again, and simple-minded handyman Tom's taped suicide "note", perhaps the only moment of true sentiment from any of the natives in the book, was a heart-rendingly memorable moment, but overall, I can't like I liked my first stay in Moose County. Rule #4...disobeyed.

  5. As unsatisfied as I was with Brahms and as prepared as I was to give in a "fail" here, I do have to admit that one does gleam a few worthy little insights about Qwilleran and the residents of his future home. With the public's inexplicable tolerance of Stanley's murder ring, we get our first, defining dose of Moose County's often maddening loyalty to social structure and conformity in face of common sense or decency. And, through Aunt Fanny's little black book, creative information-gathering, and quiet threats of blackmail, we see how the natives' "herd" mentality can be exploited to a savvy outsiders' advantage - a theme that would resurface in The Cat Who Knew a Cardinal. We see the persistence of City Qwill's somewhat superficial taste in women in his flirting with Melinda while he's still officially attached to Rosemary, and, indeed, in his eventual choice of companion. But we are once more assured of the basic decency of our hero and the integrity of his values, in that he actually seriously considers abandoning a fortune in favor of staying in his profession, and in that Qwilleran burns Fanny's book of secrets, something of particular interest to a habitual snoop that could have given him untold power and sway in the county. Perhaps seeing his own name in there under "former alcoholic" reminded him of how painful it is for anyone to have old wounds reopened.

    Brahms didn't do much else well, but it got this right. Rule #5 obeyed.

Brahms gets 2 out of 5 right. I came in on the series at Lived High, but I wonder what my reaction would've been to Braun's change of venue had I been a fan before the publication of Brahms. Probably not favorable, especially considering its follow-up effort...


The Cat Who Played Post Office

  1. Daisy's death is maudlin. It's soap-opera-like. Maudlin does not elicit reader sympathy. If anything, it constricts reader (at least this reader's) sympathy. Rule #1 disobeyed.

  2. I actually got into a rather timely discussion about the mystery in Post Office a few days ago on the Cat Who... mailing list, on which I made an offhand remark about Qwilleran here seems to be *looking* too hard for something to pry into - that while, granted, there were numerous and heinous crimes committed, the flimsy evidence at hand - left-behind clothing, graffiti in the servants' quarters - never really hints at or betrays any criminal involvement in Daisy's departure. A couple of other folks disagreed, bringing up the point that, while the evidence at hand might have been unsubstantial, the fact that Qwilleran was getting signals from his moustache vindicated his actions, and cited an instance from The Cat Who Went into the Closet, where Qwilleran's 'stache sensed something fishy about the death of Euphonia Goodwinter, a woman he had met only once and who at the time lived thousands of miles away, to buttress the case.
    Valid arguments, and they raise a point that needs to be addressed - the proper place for and employment of our heroes' extrasensory abilities. Qwilleran and Koko's sixth senses are truly part of what sets the Cat Who... series apart, yes, but since the books *are* mysteries - books where the perpetrator, motive, and sequence of events that led to a crime should be able to be logically derived from the evidence at hand - I believe that the "supernatural" (for lack of being able to recalling a better word at the moment) side of the books should complement the proceedings, not be a be-all-end-all in itself.
    The role of the moustache, in my opinion, is to, when Qwilleran's inherent journalistic suspicions are raised, tell him that his suspicions are valid and that the object causing the suspicion bears further investigation. Its signals alone should not be the impetus for an investigation per se - if they are, there's a better-than-average chance that the moustache-twitching is being hauled in as a plot device to cover up weak justification for launching an investigation in the first place.
    I don't think that the moustache's use in Went into the Closet is comparable to what I perceive as its misuse in Played Post Office - while Euphonia was getting "up there", so to speak, she was, both physically and mentally, quite healthy - obsessed with health, in fact - optimistic and happy with her life, and had no apparent reason to die when she did, much less commit suicide. Coupled with those facts, Euphonia's sudden death warrants considerable suspicion from any reasonable person, sixth sense or no. In Post Office, however, we just have Qwilleran finding some left-behind clothes belonging to a person hadn't even known or heard of (yeah, he only met Euphonia once, but they truly connected during that visit, they mutually admired each other, Qwill was close to a few of her relatives, and Euphonia was so prominent in the community that one could not live in Pickax and *not* have heard of Euphonia Gage) in a gigantic house that probably had a lot of residual debris from the numerous servants employed during the previous tenant's long stay. T'ain't much, except flimsy - and, perhaps, evidence that Qwilleran's big-city investigative-journalist mind was bored from the doldrums of his new country life and that his imagination went into overdrive and happened, by pure chance, upon something that happened to be connected to a crime - though not, I might observe, in the way he suspected. Qwill (as he himself admits at the end) was NOT EVEN CLOSE to solving the mystery this time around - it was Penelope's giftish, all-explanatory letter than unravelled everything for him - further evidence that Qwilleran's deductive processes were a little off this time around.
    A long road to a simple conclusion - Rule #2 disobeyed.

  3. A lot of show but little go for our feline wonder here. The piano playing yielded nigh-nothing helpful. "Daisy, Daisy" - well, Qwill, through his previous outlandish-but-right-as-always Fox Mulder-ish quantum leap of logic, had already decided that Ms. Mull has met an unfortunate fate, so nothing new there; "Three Blind Mice" - well, it's a bit of a jump from that to there being three people involved in the crime and cover-up (me, I would've thought that Koko was just ordering dinner), and even then, without any clues as to their identity, what help is that? True, the "Beethoven's Fifth" scene with Arch Riker is priceless, but, unfortuately, comedy, no matter how effective, ain't counted towards the score here.
    Koko does redeem himself, though, with fingering (or, rather, pawing) the "SG" on Daisy's wall, a relevant enough clue to garner half-credit.

  4. I felt that the lack of good supporting characters derailed Brahms. I think that there's a sense in Post Office that LBJ realized that, if she's going to make her new setting work, she'd better build a better supporting cast - thus the introduction of the reliable Nick Bamba and the always-entertaining Amanda Goodwinter and the reappearance of Arch Riker and Mrs. Cobb to address that need and fill that void.
    Still, though, there was too much focus on the lessinteresting/more annoying charas - sumg, pretentious, faux-chic Melinda, beyond-bland Tiffany Trotter (no normal sentient human could be this..._blank_; I'm thinking either somanbulist, automaton, or pod person), and Birch Tree, professional big dumb lug. I don't like spending time in the company of big dumb lugs, even if they are the villains. (It says something that none of these folks return for The Cat Who Knew Shakespeare.) For this, I can grant only half-credit, though I do acknowledge and appreciate how Braun recognized part of the Character problme here and laid the groundwork for better things to come.

  5. The big qulaifier here is obviously Qwilleran's characteristic, character-defining behavior during his mesmerizing attack of amnesia - our hero, the eternal sleuth, trying to deduce and assemble his past from the brief flashes his failed memory allows him.
    Rule #5 satisfied by this scene alone, but I'd be remiss not to mention a couple other points - first, when Qwilleran's nimble, journalistic, knowledge-hungry mind gets stranded in an intellectually stagnant environment, his natural curiosity goes into overdrive - hence his jumping to then-unfounded conclusions with Daisy's left-behind clothing. Second - Qwill's weakness for attractive career gals leads his to do stupid or out-of-character things - witness the fancy, pretentious dinner party Melinda dragoons Qwill into hosting - or, rather, financing her hosting.

So Post Office goes 2 for 5 on the Rules. Most of its shortcomings fall within the mystery-related categories. A few more words in my defense, considering, judging from the response on the Cat Who... mailing list, how beloved Post Office is. No matter how you regard the story of the Daisy and the Goodwinters, you cannot say that it was well-fashioned into a mystery. None of the events or emotions were suggested or unfolded gradually over the course of the narrative - they were just all dumped in our laps with the arrival of Penelope's (admittedly well-written) letter. With most of the participants (save for Penelope, her grief, love, and agony painfully and clearly communicated in her words (in the letter) and actions (during her drunken visit to Qwilleran) - perhaps this should have been a Rule #5 entry) unfamiliar in this capacity and thus reduced to cartoon characters, we have little left but melodrama. Melodrama does not make a mystery.


The Cat Who Knew Shakespeare

  1. A venerable, integral institution of Moose County, a kindly man dedicated heart and soul to his job, and a father and son and their personal enterprise were torn apart by a greedy wife - and we felt it. I think that that amply qualifies for - exemplifies, even - Rule #1 compliance.

  2. Y'know, the batteries for Qwilleran's moustache must've run low, since he seems oblivious to the idea of foul play in Senior Goodwinter's death, despite the man's suspiciously merry widow romancin' rich financiers and hustlin' to liquidate her late husband's assets before he's cold in the ground. That ought've piqued at least a *few* whiskers. Instead, most of his efforts were directed towards preventing Gritty Goodwinter from selling the Picayune, which was an understandably important task. But Rule #2 disobeyed anyway. Yeah, folks, I know - it's tough.

  3. Koko keeps knocking Hamlet off the shelf, supposedly to draw Qwill's attention to the similarities between the plot of the play and the real-life drama unfolding in Pickax. Neat-o parallelism, but considering that Gritty's behavior was already suspicious, this really didn't yield any new information (and, besides, if this connection were carried to its logical end, we'd wind up on the wrong track with either Don Exbridge or Harry Noyton as our prime suspect, so...). We're left with Koko tearing up the _herb_ cart and reacting negatively to Herb Hackpole, the intent of which is thrown all out of kilter by Iris Cobb's decidedly wrong impending marriage to Hackpole - considering that Koko's acted up before against people he deems poor prospective mates, and considering that this union would've been ill-advised had Hackpole not been a killer, what we discover in the end was meant to be a clue to the crime could, at the time, been perceived as - and, to an extent, was - Koko, in his own catly way, telling someone he really didn't like to get lost.
    I oughta declare Rule #3 disobeyed, but, the thing is, I really can't think of anything else that Koko could've done to clue Qwilleran in on what really went on in the Goodwinter tragedy. So, I'll give Koko half-credit here. But that's stretching it.

  4. Here, I feel, is where Shakespeare shines, especially in comparison to the bland characters of Brahms and Post Office - we see where Braun is evolving and refining her core Moose County cast members to lay the groundwork for deeper, richer human stories and relationships with Qwill. To achieve this, our author, for the most part, restricts her focus to just a few folks - Iris Cobb, Junior Goodwinter, and Hixie Rice - each of whom are going through periods of change and tough times in their lives, and each of whom are dealing with them in his or her own way. And we see their struggles detailed in minutiae through their contact with Qwilleran - we get to know them, we empathize with them, they're not just background noise anymore, and we have a few anchors for the country episodes to come. An excellent way to battle the homogenity so pervasive in the local folk we met in the last two installments. Rule #4 obeyed.

    refreshing that Lilian chose to take a break and get her house in order.

  5. As stated in the section on Rule #4, Braun has allowed for more depth in Qwill's companions. This is the true gem of the novel, but we do sneak of few new peaks at our tried-and-true hero.
    One: as I said in my review, Qwill has clearly become more of a native since we last saw him; he has developed a small interest in local history; he's getting a handle on the local weather lingo; even though I haven't broken the habit, he no longer heaves sighs of of incredulity and exasperation at crazy Moose County customs. He's firmly enough entrenched on the former side of the Up Here vs. Down Below that he takes to baiting a man whom, now knowledgeable of the differences between Us and Them, he identifies as "obviously foreign" just to see his exasperation. My complaint against all this, I suppose, is that I would've liked to have seen more of how this transformation took place - as it is, it just appears that Qwilleran "became" native overnight - to quote Robert Schmitz (an old acquanitance of mine), "Familiarity breeds tolerance, perhaps?". Especially when tolerance will net you a nine-to-ten-digit inheritance - but I've still would've liked to have seen more on how Qwill "came around". (To be frank, I'm not sure it's an improvement.)
    Two: Qwilleran is getting used to the idea of having money, and since becoming accustomed to having buckets of cash, has gotten...hmmm...comfy enough to throw his weight around a little bit, as per the scene where he bosses Harry Noyton (dang good to see the guy again, even if, atypical of Shakespeare, he doesn't have quite the depth he did in Danish Modern, and even if Braun did - completely unnecessarily, I might add - kill him off) around after he (Noyton) kicks around a few (amusingly) ridiculous ideas for Moose County development projects (enough to make Noyton joke, "Okay, General. Yes sir, General"). Qwill's realization of the power that his fortune has afforded him has caused him to somewhat lose that occupational sense of diplomacy. Interesting to see how that will affect his investigational finesse.
    Finally, the whole deal of the establishment of the Moose County Something: besides being an excellent group-interaction piece for Qwill and Arch and Junior, besides being a fine showcase for Hixie's cockamanie entrepreneurism, it provided a nice li'l bit of characterization of the Moose County psyche in general - that, when confronted with an wide range of options, Pickax folks are just gonna go for the most ornery of the choices - they're an ornery people in general, but (paradoxically) they're conformist in sticking together in their orneriness. That, or that, once in a while, an entire region can have one big collective "what the hell" moment and vote for the flippantly ridiculous. (Explains a lot about the Jesse Ventura election.)

Shakespeare earns 3-3.5 out of 5, mostly losing points on the investigational details. It's probably for the best that Braun took time out from such affairs to get her cast house in order. As I (again) said in my review: "Note that I have not said that The Cat Who Knew Shakespeare is about any sort of mystery plot. There are crimes committed, yes, crimes of great heinousness indeed, but there is practically no investigation - Qwilleran never seriously expects foul play, the solution (uncorked a couple of pages before the end of a novel) is a sheer gift, and the punishment of the perpertrators takes care of itself. An odd paradox - Qwill devoted an unworldly amount of time to snooping and prying in Brahms and Post Office, in which he had little ground for concern and whose criminal plots were uninvolving at best, but here neglects an overtly suspicious situation with an emotional impact that really hits home. Even odder - I didn't consider this an egregious fault. A conspicuous oversight, yes, but it is far from fatal, because Qwilleran is nothing if not busy this book - listening to his friends, helping them cope, and trying to haul them out of scrapes when necessary, shooting a TV commercial with Hixie and Koko, interviewing old timers, engaging in a bidding war with an antiques dealer at an auction, getting lost in a blizzard, hosting a wedding... The mystery of Senior Goodwinter's demise doesn't pervade the plot, but the story of the book itself (wisely) doesn't hinge on it, and the other proceedings prove competently entertaining nonetheless." After all the empty to-do of Brahms and Post Office, it's a relief and a blessing and to read a book that just shuts up and is competent. (Yeah, I know; this whole analysis was one big review quote. Mea culpa.)

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