Whiskers & Smoke: Flames Are Catnip to a Deadly Arsonist on Edgemarsh Lake...

That's fine with me, because although I love cats, most cat-mysteries aren't very good because they're too focused on cat descriptions and too little focused on plot. Babson's mysteries typically include cats, but this mystery is really about a small "lake town" in New Hampshire that's been having a problem with arson during a particularly bad draught. The main character is Rosemary, an English woman with two children and a sister who lives in this town. Recently widowed, she agrees to spend the summer in New Hampshire in a house-swap arrangement. Each house has a cat, and Errol, a Maine Coon, goes with the NH house. Rosemary realizes that something is very wrong with her sister and brother-in-law. Rosemary's husband is appearing in disturbing dreams, and there's a sense of anxiety that grows as the drought worsens and fires come closer together. A cast of characters are introduced, and presumably, one of them is the arsonist. But what's going on with anxious Celia, the sister, and her nervous wreck of a husband? The tension and sense that something odd is going on builds like a Twilight Zone episode -- is Rosemary imagining things because of the trauma of her husband's unexpected death? Or is the right to be concerned? There's not a lot of action in this book -- it's a psychological cozy with a big cat thrown in. One minor point: tThe book was written in the mid eighties, which may explain some things that seemed odd to me. For example, Errol, the Maine Coon is not only unneutered but allowed to wander free. I had the criminal pegged early on, more through instinct than anything else, but it did not detract from my enjoyment of the book. Besides, there were a couple of surprises in the book besides discovering the arsonist.