"The Marvellous Mrs. Murphy Does It Again!"

The sixth "Mrs. Murphy Mystery," featuring Mary Minor "Harry" Haristeen and her pets (Mrs. Murphy, the tiger cat; Tee Tucker, the corgi bitch; and Pewter, the fat gray cat who used to live in Market Shifflett's grocery), takes some interesting new tangents.

There's a Civil War re-enactment, a haughty Britisher who gets shot (not fatally) in the very midst of the fray, a small plane hidden in an old stone barn, and a missing pilot; a dismaying discovery by the three animals in a pit full of discarded farm machinery, and the revelation it leads to; an appearance by the Reverend Herb Jones's cats, Elocution and Lucy Fur, who've been mentioned but never introduced before in the series; a cabal that may or may not be illegal but is certainly leading to some strange doings; and a murder that goes unsolved, even by the notoriously nosy Mrs. Murphy.

The high point of the novel, though, has to be the astonishing scene in which Tucker and the cats, having discovered Harry's neighbor Blair Bainbridge lying in his Porsche freshly shot, contrive to literally drive the car home to their mistress so she can call for help. It sounds incredible, but as Brown has set it up (foreshadowing with a newspaper story about a dog ticketed for driving without a license), it just seems a believable outgrowth of a series in which animals talk to one another, read the mail and the newspaper, and help solve crimes while still acting plausibly like animals. A not-to-be- missed entry.

Reviewed by Christine Jeffords
Posted July 23, 2002