Attorney Nancie Hays calls her private investigators, Helen Hawthorne and her husband, Phil Sagemont, at five a.m. on a Monday morning and requests their immediate presence at her office. Nancie has an important client that needs help on a custody case, and the woman is practically in hysterics. When Helen and Phil get to Nancie's office to possibly rescue a kidnapped child, they learn that the victim is a four month old, pedigreed Chartreux called Justine, and owned jointly by bazillionaire Trish Barrymore and her ex- husband, Mortimore, or as Phil calls him "Smart Mort." The Court granted joint custody of Justine, with each owner getting her for six months at a time. Mort should have returned the cat no later than 5 AM. Mort, an extraordinary CPA with a Midas touch for investing for his well-heeled clients, has never been late in returning the kitten before. When Mort Draco wed Trish Barrymore he took her last name, as her late family had been social leaders and Mort came from nothing.

Helen and Phil are owners and operators of Coronado Investigations, an unseasoned enterprise. Nancie hands over Mort's house keys to the PI pair. Mort is home, and very dead; he was bludgeoned with Justine's Zen Cat Tower, and Justine is nowhere to be found. Helen calls the police before she calls Nancie, and the detective that shows up immediately issues a warrant for Trish's arrest. Now Coronado Investigations must not only find the catnapper -- that finally called and asked for five-hundred-thousand dollars in ransom -- they have to find Mort's killer and hope they are one and the same.

Meanwhile, the couple's landlady and Helen's surrogate mom, Margery, cannot afford all the repairs needed to keep the old Coronado apartment complex from being condemned. Also, Margery's ex-husband, Zach, has returned after his exit in 1978. By some weird coincidence Zach has a patent pending on the Zen Cat Tower. No one wants to leave the Coronado, and asks Margery to wait on selling to a developer.

CATNAPPED! is one of Elaine Viets' best book to date. Ms. Viets' describes with wry humor the life of pedigreed cats and their owners; plus she has spun more than one interesting and plausible storyline, and has seamlessly brought them all together. Phil and Helen are growing as investigators, and their honeymoon is still going strong. Residents of the Coronado are strong, helpful characters that are featured in every book. Cozy Mystery tales just can't get any better than CATNAPPED!.

Book Summary

No more pussyfooting around! Husband and wife PI team Helen Hawthorne and Phil Sagemont have barely scratched the surface of the world of show cats when a cornered kitty kidnapper’s claws come out....

This show cat is a no-show....

The one thing celebrity Trish Barrymore and her no-account accountant husband, Mort, can agree on in their bitter divorce is shared cat custody. But when Mort is found brained by a mahogany cat tower, and Justine, their pedigreed Chartreux show cat, goes missing, Trish calls on Helen and Phil. Despite a ransom note from the catnapper, Trish is still the prime murder suspect in the eyes of the police. As they await the post-Mort-em, it’s up to Helen and Phil to find the feline filcher and let the cat out of the bag.

Discovering that Mort had some shady dealings within cat show circles, Helen goes undercover as an assistant for a woman who shows prizewinning Persians. But Phil is not buying Trish’s cat-that-swallowed-a-canary act—he thinks she might be staging the whole catnapping.

As Helen and Phil get deeper into a high-pressure world of primping, posing, and purring to collar a killer, they get caught up in a cat-and-mouse game where the stakes are literally life and death....

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