Synopsis
Dulcie Schwartz and her feline friends get tangled up in this mysterious yarn . . . - Caught between a distracted supervisor and university politics, Dulcie’s doctoral thesis looks doomed. When she stumbles across the bloodied body of a fellow student, things couldn’t get any worse. Unless her mother’s dreams turn out to be premonitions and Dulcie’s work has all been in vain . . . With the ghost of Mr Grey – her wise and loyal late, great cat – strangely silent, and her new kitten refusing to speak, this time Dulcie might just be on her own.
Publishers Weekly
Sluggish pacing mars Simon's second feline mystery starring Harvard doctoral candidate and nosy parker Dulcie Schwartz (after 2009's Shades of Grey). Outside the Cambridge home of her adviser, Professor William Bullock, with whom she just had an uneasy talk about her unfinished thesis on an obscure Gothic novel fragment called The Ravages of Umbria, Dulcie happens on the bloody corpse of handsome Cameron Dessay, a comp lit whiz who recently switched to English. Dulcie is understandably horrified, as is Professor Bullock's assistant, one of Cameron's many female admirers. Sussing out whodunit leads Dulcie and Mr. Grey, her ghost cat, into dangerous territory, while her romance with fellow grad student Chris Sorenson suffers. Though Simon scores with the spectral Mr. Grey and the likable Dulcie, some cozy fans will find Dulcie's constant fretting over her thesis distracting and wish for fewer details about the world of academia. (May)