Canapes for the Kitties by Marian Babson Review

St. Martin's Press, Sept., 1997.
Hardcover, 221 pages.
ISBN: 0312169299.
Ordering information: Amazon.com.

Canapes for the Kitties
by Marian Babson

Popular mystery author Lucinda Lucas has a terrible secret. She loathes Miss Petunia, Lily and Lorinda, her fictional crime-solving spinsters so beloved to her editors and her public. Unable to help herself, she plots their demise in increasingly gruesome ways, then hides the endings in a folder in her office. But one day, Lucinda returns to her cozy cottage home in the writer's colony of Brimful Coffers to find that her literary creations want to live -- and are willing to sacrifice Lucinda in order to make that happen. Convinced she is either losing her mind or that one of the Brimful Coffers neighbors is playing a terrible joke on her Lucinda tentatively reports her problems to her novelist friends, only to find that they too are being threatened by their own characters. When real life begins to imitate art and members of the town begin to be killed off, Lucinda must find the killer and restore peace to both the fictional and real worlds.

Marian Babson has penned an amusing and intriguing tale with her latest creation. The mixture of fantasy and fact and the backstage glimpse into the trials and tribulations of the working mystery novelist are quite funny, and the antics of the authors' mystery characters add an unusual twist to the usual English village cozy. Unusual and entertaining.

--Claire E. White