Search - Sour Puss

OK. This series has been going downhill since the author began apparantly using it as a platform for her personal issues. The cuteness and the mystery are still there but you have to work for it, slogging through lengthy discourses on ecoterrorism, viticulture, and oenology. Don't know what these are? You will! I kept wondering if there was going to be a pop quiz.

Mrs. Murphy (tiger cat) Pewter (gray cat) and Tucker (corgi) help Harry solve a mystery about the Virginia wine grapes.
Strangely, this book takes partial place in Blacksburg,Va. and Virginia Tech.

REPORTEDLY A JOINT EFFORT OF MS. BROWN AND SNEAKY PIE BROWN, A TIGER CAT DISCOVERED BY MS BROWN AT HER LOCAL SPCA. THE TWO HAVE COAUTHORED 13 MYSTERIES. "IT TAKES A CAT TO WRITE THE PURRFECT MYSTERY."

"The 13th Mrs. Murphy mystery from bestseller Brown and her feline collaborator opens with the comic-opera remarriage of series heroine Harry Haristeen and Fair, Harry's veterinarian ex-husband, reintroducing at length some familiar characters before turning to the novel's main focus—the vagaries of the burgeoning wine industry in the Virginia Piedmont. The prospect of having your own label or selling at a profit to another winery is too good to pass up, and even Harry and Fair have put in a quarter acre of Petit Manseng grapes. But someone is trying to scare off the competition, and the disappearance of a respected expert in the mutation of toxins sets Harry's talking pets—cats Mrs. Murphy and Pewter and corgi Tee Tucker—on the sleuthing trail. When a longstanding feud between rival vintners leads to murder, Harry has to read the clues before attrition gives us the answers. Brown provides a captivating look at grape growing and the passionate dedication it requires."
- Publisher's Weekly

Now that Harry and Fair have remarried, you'd think things would settle down in their lives. But no, the whole area is getting into grape growing and wine making -- and murder is the result (two murders, actually).