Cozy Mystery Cats and Dogs: Do You Have a Favorite?

Have any cozy mystery novels with cats or dogs on the cover? Makes me think that cozy readers are also pet lovers, whether they read contemporary mysteries or historical mysteries.

Take a look at a sample of book covers with felines and dogs perched on the covers.

A Fete Worse Than Death by Claudia Bishop. Someone gets killed during the rivalry of crafters at a Spring Fete in upstate New York. No mention of the cat!

Bowled Over by Victoria Hamilton, with a Fourth of July contemporary setting. Vintage kitchenware and cookbook collector finds the body of a former friend. 

The Christie Curse by Victoria Abbott, set in New York in 1926, involves a sleuth hunting down rare mystery novels for a book collector. 

A Marked Man by Barbara Hamilton, set in colonial America. The book description doesn't mention the role of the cat on the cover.

Do animals or pets on the cover persuade you to pick up a book? Let's see what the publisher's descriptions have to say about these books.I think there are animals in all these mysteries but they are not crucial to the plot as some other cats/dogs are in other books.

My favorite dog centered mystery series, for example include Spencer Quinn's Chet and Bernie mysteries, Chet being the dog in a detective duo.

I reviewed The Dog Who Knew Too Much by Spencer Quinn two years ago and liked it so much, especially Chet the dog, that I went back and read the others in the series. The stories are told by Chet, and they are amusing as well as charming! Quinn surely knows how to get us into the mind of a dog!

Another fave dog mystery is Ten Little Bloodhounds by the late Virginia Lanier. The series is excellent! The bloodhounds of course help Jo Beth Sidden find the clues.


The first mystery series I read that featured animals was Susan Conant's Dog Lovers Mysteries with her two Alaskan malamutes. I reviewed Brute Strength a couple years ago, and of course I've read all the books in the series, at least 19 of them.  Here's another one that's good:



In Animal Appetite, the 10th in the series, Holly Winter and her two Alaskan Malamutes in Cambridge, Mass. find the murderer of one of their own - a dog lover.

What about cats as the main feature in mystery novels, by writers such as
Rita Mae Brown and Lilian Jackson Braun and their talking detective cats;
Sofie Kelly and her Magical Cats,
Miranda James and her librarian's cat,
Leann Sweeney and her Cats in Trouble.
And there are so many, many more with a cat theme.

Do you have a favorite animal mystery novelist or series?

Book Review: CAT BEARING GIFTS by Shirley Rousseau Murphy

Title: Cat Bearing Gifts: A Joe Grey Mystery by Shirley Rousseau Murphy
Published November 20, 2012; William Morrow
Source: publisher

This is the 18th in the Joel Grey Mystery series, featuring several talking cat sleuths. I have not read many of the talking cat mystery novels, preferring dogs in crime fiction, but I was willing to give this new book a try. I liked the cover of the book, the colorful artwork and the cat decorated in jewels.

The first half of the book was enjoyable. I didn't mind a group of speaking cats who could use cell phones to dial 911 or call their friends or owners in the course of the mystery. But once the novel began to discuss trips to the Netherworld where a strange world existed underground, a place that may be the origin of the mystical powers of cats and the source of the jewelry, and once two of the cats began to squabble like humans about whether or not to take a trip there, well...... that stretched it a bit for me.

The crime plot by itself would have been fine, even with speaking cat sleuths. I would have preferred to see the rest, the mystical parts, taken out of this mystery novel.

Publisher's book description: "On the way home from visiting their friend Kate Osborne in San Francisco, tortoiseshell cat, Kit, and her elderly housemates, Lucinda and Pedric Greenlaw, are hurt in a car crash on a winding coastal road. Then two men steal the Greenlaws' town car, making off with a secret hoard of jewels and gold hidden inside its doors. As paramedics rush the Greenlaws to the emergency room,  Kit hides from hungry coyotes in the forested hills above the highway, waiting for Joe, Pan, and their human companions, Ryan and Clyde Damen, to rescue her.

Back home in Molena Point, Joe Grey and his tabby lady prowl an abandoned stone cottage where they've discovered two rough-looking men hiding. The cats smell mildewed money, and soon smell human blood, too, and they wonder: Could these unsettling incidents be tied to the injury of the Greenlaws and to the theft of their car and treasure? Could they be, as well, part of the larger mystery involving the very source of the cats' magical powers?

 Though the cats know more than the thieves about the unique items stolen, only slowly, and after two sudden murders, do they claw their way to the truth, examining the source of the gold and jewels, understanding the secrets of the moldering treasury bills—the mystery of their source, generations past..."

Cat in a Vegas Gold Vendetta by Carol Nelson Douglas

Opening sentences in a book can give readers a sense of the style of writing and can influence their decision on whether or not to read a book. Here are the beginning sentences for Cat in a Vegas Gold Vendetta, a mystery featuring the cat Midnight Louie, by Carole Nelson Douglas.

Temple's fingers were doing the flamenco across her laptop keyboard, writing an e-mail press release, with Midnight Louie, her twenty-pound black cat, playing his usual role of paperweight beside her, when her phone rang.

She jumped.

Midnight Louie growled in alarm and rose up on his forelegs.

Temple wasn't the skittish type. You had to have nerves of steel to deal with the emergencies and sudden zigs and zags that a freelance public-relations person had to control, particularly in Vegas, and particularly in these Internet character-assassination days. (ch. 1)

Title: Cat in a Vegas Gold Vendetta: A Midnight Louie Mystery

I'm getting used to the idea of a cat being a sleuth, so I will be reading this book and hoping it will get me interested in the previous Midnight Louie mysteries. After all, this is the 23rd in the series!! I also think I may have won this book as it has been hiding on my shelves, waiting like a cat to pounce, to get my attention.

Book Review: The Big Kitty by Claire Donally

"You don't seem too familiar with cats, if you don't mind my saying so. What'd he do, adopt you?"
"I - I guess so," Sunny admitted. (ch.14)

Title: The Big Kitty: A Sunny and Shadows Mystery
Author: Claire Donally
Paperback: 304 pages; Berkley; May 1, 2012

I had just gotten this book and couldn't resist reading it right away. The big kitty on the cover drew me in, but as I opened the book, I hoped I wasn't going to be meeting a talking cat. Luckily for me, Shadow doesn't talk to humans, but we find out what he's thinking through our omniscient narrator, the author, who tell us all.

Shadow was an independent cat, who came and went as he pleased, fed and housed by a Cat Lady who owned dozens of other cats. When the cat lady Ada is found dead at the bottom of her basement stairs, a new person comes into his life - Sunny, a young woman whom he follows home and who takes him in, in spite of her elderly father who tries many times to get rid of him.

Nevertheless, Shadow becomes a big help to Sunny, a part-time reporter, and helps in her investigation of the cat lady Ada, whose death is ruled a homicide. Ada had let everyone know that she had misplaced a winning lottery ticket worth six million dollars and was searching for it. Several people in the small Maine town had good reason to want that ticket.

The big kitty saves Sunny's life at least once during her investigation, and so becomes one of a team of two - amateur sleuths in this first in the new cozy series. It's a cute twosome and a clever play of words in the name -Sunny and Shadow.

Sunny's personality and Shadow's silent but intriguing point of view make the cozy worthwhile, though I found this story lagged in the second half.  I am looking forward to the next in the series!

I received a complimentary review copy of The Big Kitty.