CAT IN A WHITE TIE AND TAILS is Carole Nelson Douglas' twenty fourth Midnight Louie mystery. Midnight Louie is the title cat, a former television star who's spending his retirement keeping an eye on his favorite humans: Temple Barr, public relations guru for a Las Vegas casino, and her fiancé, former priest turned talk radio personality Matt Devine. When the trio travels to Chicago for a family affair, Midnight Louie is kidnapped, and has to use all his Vegas street smarts to get back home.

That's a large part of the book, but it's just a teensy part of the overall plot.

This is the first Midnight Louie novel I've read, and unlike many mystery series that I've started in the middle, I felt that I was at a disadvantage. Douglas tries to get new readers up to speed, with a Midnight Louis monologue to start and explanations smattered throughout, but it's all very complex. You have Temple's amnesiac ex-boyfriend Max Kinsella, a magician slash spy, who's investigating his own "death" and the mysterious woman he met in Europe who's turned up in Vegas; a bunch of unsolved murders; a whole gang of cats who are following everyone around; a disappearing and unidentified corpse...

Yes, very complex.

I enjoyed the writing for the most part. Midnight Louie has chapters in his own voice, and I sometimes found it hard to follow his train of thought. Ditto for the chapters told by Louie's young protégé Midnight Louise. When it worked for me, I liked it. When I had to re-read a sentence to figure out what they were trying to say, I didn't.

I like Temple, Matt, Max, and their cop/former-cop friends C.R. Molina and Rafi Nadir. I was very intrigued by the arcing plots about the Synth, the Irish Republican Army, and the mob. If you can, I would recommend reading the other twenty three Midnight Louie mysteries first, so you're not, like me, trying to figure it all out as you go along.

Book Summary

In Carole Nelson Douglas' Cat in a White Tie and Tails, Midnight Louie goes along as chaperone when PR whiz Temple Barr and her fiance, rising media star Matt Devine, head to Chicago so she can meet his family. Matt's mother has a tragic past primed to rise and bite anybody in reach, even the ex-alley cat sleuth. When Louie is snatched, the catnapping's surprising motive loops back to Vegas and a string of unsolved murders connected to magic…and ex-magician Max Kinsella, Temple's former significant other.

Skeptical homicide lieutenant C. R. Molina has commissioned Max to investigate the cold case murder she suspects he committed two years earlier. With traumatic amnesia from a recent attempt on his life, the once infallible Max is more sitting duck than predator. It will take an alliance of frenemies to solve the serial deaths before one of them joins the fatality list.