In Six Cats A Slayin’, the latest book by Miranda James, Charlie Harris is getting ready for Christmas when he opens the door and finds a box filled with five kittens. The box contains a note in a child’s scrawl that “he” was going to kill the kittens, so they needed protection. Filled with compassion, Charlie takes in the kittens, and his boarder sheriff’s deputy Haskell, builds a large crate to keep all five kittens. Charlie’s Maine coon cat, Diesel, who goes everywhere with Charlie and is the most famous cat in Athena, surprises everyone by adopting the kittens as a surrogate father. He even skips his usual trips to the library with Charlie to babysit his new charges.
In the meantime, Gerry Arbitron, who claims to have been a lifelong resident of Athena despite no one’s seeming to remember her, has moved in across the street from Charlie. He feels uncomfortable when she starts flirting heavily with Charlie, who makes a point of playing up his relationship with Helen Louise as a buffer against Gerry’s advances. Gerry shows herself to be an aggressive real estate agent, trying to get people in the neighborhood to sell their homes. Then comes the night of Gerry’s elaborate Christmas party that she throws for the whole neighborhood. Making an effort to impress everyone, Gerry serves expensive champagne in flutes but drinks brandy in a snifter herself. She has a fight with two separate women, so when Gerry suddenly dies, there is no shortage of suspects.
Six Cats A Slayin’ is a strong murder mystery, but even more so, it is a celebration of life, both new and old. We quickly fall in love with the new kittens, one of whom, the rambunctious Ramses, named after the precocious boy in Elizabeth Peters’s books, captures everyone’s heart. But we also get to celebrate the first Christmas with little Charlie, son of big Charlie’s daughter, Laura, and her husband, Frank, and Baby Rosie, daughter of Charlie’s son, Frank, with his wife, Alex.
However, we also see the darker side of having a newborn, as Alex plunges into such deep postpartum depression that she has to be hospitalized for malnutrition and dehydration, as well as complete exhaustion. I appreciated this demonstration of this genuine and serious illness that affects so many new mothers, shining light on the way depression, whether postpartum or not, often makes the victim blind to its presence and in denial of the need of help. It takes an intervention, led by a therapist friend, to make Alex see that she needs help and reminds us to look out for others who might be suffering from a similar condition.
This book, indeed the whole series, further reminds us that family is what we choose to create. Charlie has his biological family of his son and daughter and their respective families, but he also has Helen Louise, his “partner,” who has become part of the family. In addition, he had found the younger brother he always wished he had in Stewart Delacorte, thecflamboyant gay Athena College chemistry teacher, who moved into Charlie’s big house in the second book in the series, Classified as Murder. More recently, Stewart’s partner, deputy Haskell, the solid and dependable one of the family, has moved in to the house as well. Though they may not be related, they all form one big family, along with Azalea, the housekeeper who might not admit to loving everyone, including “Mr. Cat,” but who would die for them all.
Erin Bennett performs the audio version of Six Cats A Slayin’ with a strong delivery that makes one forget that the grandfather Charlie is being voiced by a woman. Her role as Diesel, with his warbles, tweets, and chirps makes the cat obviously a regular character in the book. Further, she makes us feel the intense concern as Alex dives even more deeply and dangerously into post- partum depression. When some big reveals occur, Bennett helps us accept them without judgment on individuals who acted against social norms. This performance is truly a gem within a gem of a book.
I deeply enjoyed Six Cats A Slayin’. This book spends less time than typical in investigating the murder, but it shows the lives of Charlie’s family in such a way as to endear them to even a first- time reader of a Cat in the Stacks (a.k.a. Diesel) book. I give this book a hearty five stars!
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