Review: A Night's Tail

A Night's Tail by Sofie Kelly
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

2.5 stars 

I received this book for free in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review. 

This wasn’t my first dead body. 

A Night's Tale is the eleventh installment in the Magical Cats Mystery series that takes place in a small town called Mayville Heights in Minnesota. Our first person pov and who the series follows, is from Kathleen who is a Boston transplant working as a librarian. I haven't read the other books in the series and as a consequence, I struggled to keep the large amount of characters straight in my mind. I would say the first 20% of this was overly descriptive (Do we really need to know which side of a haircut everyone is on?) muses from Kathleen of her friends and the townspeople. If you're a frequent reader of the series, you would probably enjoy meeting up with everyone again but as a new reader, it was too many characters to juggle and details that clogged the story. 

Owen could become invisible at will. It had seemed so shocking the first time I’d realized what he could do, and now it was no big deal— for the most part. Hercules, on the other hand— or maybe that should be “paw”— could walk through walls. 

The series follows Kathleen but her two cats could arguably be the stars of the show. They were feral cats that Kathleen found on a Wisteria Hill and for the last three years, Kathleen has known about their magical abilities, which they apparently use to not only confuse unknowing humans by showing up in random spots but help Kathleen solve murder cases. As this is a cozy mystery series, there are a lot of murder cases in this town. I really wish the cats Owen and Hercules would have been utilized more, they're around in the story but the murder mystery plot doesn't really get rolling until almost the 60% mark and the cats come into the latter second half more and help. With a cover sporting cats and a series titled “Magical Cats”, I wanted them to have more of the spotlight. 

“We have to figure out who killed Lewis Wallace,” I said. “Mrr,” Hercules agreed. He put one white‑tipped paw on my hand . He was in. 

The murder takes place at 30% and it is of a character new to the town and who hasn't made a great impression, so the suspects are wide and varied, which is fun for a murder mystery. Kathleen is also dating a detective, their romance seems to be threaded throughout the series, so we get some helpful information from him on the murder thread. Kathleen's brother is in town with his band and staying with her and as one of his bandmates had an altercation with the victim and was with Kathleen when she came upon the body at the hotel, they're all close to the case. Kathleen decides to do her own investigation into the case to try and help keep her brother off the suspect list as he was the one who bought the peanut butter muffins that ended up sending the victim into anaphylactic shock and ruled the cause of death. 

“Most people are not all one thing,” she said. “You might want to keep that in mind.” 

Through Kathleen's investigations, the story revisits past characters and couples while giving some a little more background and setting up possible romances for future books in the series. As I said, I was new to the world, so some of this felt like filler to me and I wanted more of a focus on the cats helping out with the murder mystery. The mystery gets a little convoluted in it's red-herring travels but circles around to a plausible and credible set-up reasons for why the guilty did what they did. This is a cozy mystery, so except everything to be done and presented with more of a lighter touch than gritty. 

Just like that, I knew who had killed Lewis Wallace. 

The murder mystery accelerates at around 80% and Kathleen ends up solving the case. The last 10% has Kathleen deciding to let her detective boyfriend in on the magical abilities of her two cats because she doesn't want to lie to him anymore and he also happens to have a cat from Wisteria Hill and she's noticed that cat has some magical abilities too. He at first reacts the way one would think you would when told a cat can walk through walls but after seeing it for himself, gets a little hurt that Kathleen is just telling him now when they have been dating almost two years. The series will obvious continue with them working on their relationship and maybe bringing in his cat Micah to help with further investigations. Readers of the series will probably enjoy this more than I did as I couldn't quite keep up with the large cast of characters. The over descriptions of character looks in the beginning clogged the story for me and while there was some interesting tidbits of information (the Andrew Carnegie library tie-in), I thought the writer was a little too eager to include their random bits of research. If you like magical cats that help solve murder mysteries though, Owen and Hercules will steal your heart, if not your food.

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