Read May 2023 ★ ★ 1/2 A scourge of tolerability, really. The premise is mildly encouraging: the straight-laced, down-on-his-luck, broke-as-, private investigator paired with a cat (apparently, all cats can talk but this one is willing to break the rules). A beautiful woman comes to them with a request to retrieve a book and the shenanigans are on.
This feels very first novel. Despite being first person from the cat perspective, the vast majority of the time, the voice felt solidly millennial dude (no judgement implied; just that I doubt cats sound the same). Mostly, though, it just felt okay.
"If anyone had asked how business was going, I could have summed it up like this: currently, a very large man with a very bald head was waving a very heavy tyre iron around our office in a very threatening manner. And our office being too small to swing the proverbial cat (and trust me, that'd better be proverbial. Cats do not take kindly to such treatment), he had already cracked the back of the rickety chair on his side of the desk, smashed on of our three remaining overhead fluorescent lights, and had come alarmingly close to my ears where I crouched on top of the rusty old filing cabinet."
The style has a humous approach that keeps it entertaining. The first escapade is more slapstick but eventually it gets more surreal. I liked the hints of depth for the characters, particularly when Gob talked about walking the in-between. I would have liked to dive into Callum's backstory, but I'm guessing that will be a later book. This story develops potential connections, both friendly and otherwise, for both Callum and Gob that feel genuine.
For me, the general writing and the unfulfilled cat premise probably isn't enough to return me to the series, but you never know. Curiosity might strike.
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