Review: The Curious Case of the Kitnapped Cat

em.thompson, The Curious Case of the Kitnapped Cat (Eccentric Directions 2024)

Crime fiction at its most comedic

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/213564034-the-curious-case-of-the-kitnapped-cat?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=9HpLkIRzai&rank=1

Terrence ‘Tiny’ Bottomley, a swot in Heather Prendergast’s class at Merton Police College, answers the teacher’s question on ‘the most important weapons in a modern detective’s armoury’.
‘Forensics, CCTV footage, DNA analysis…’ he begins.
Prendergast begs to disagree. She believes in ‘old fashioned gut instinct’. It may be that even her zany and filthy rich Aunt Elizabeth’s hefty bribes—I mean, donations—won’t be sufficient to get her to graduation so she can achieve her dream of becoming ‘Prendergast of The Yard’.
Armed with her Girl Guides training and her illustrated Sherlock Holmes almanac, Prendergast’s gut instincts lead her on another madcap case, in the course of which she is ever decked in the highest-end yet most outrageously inappropriate fashion from Paris or Milan. The campus cafeteria skivvy Debb’s gran’s cat Puffball is missing, and aided by Tiny and Debbs, Prendergast goes in pursuit, wreaking hilarious havoc everywhere she goes.
Em.thompson is a master comedic wordsmith, inventing words and phrases (‘cornerflap of pinafore’, ‘humzinger of a brainwave’, ‘bedraggled straggle of homelessness’, ‘earwigaphobia and occasional bouts of dreadheightedness’) and twisting metaphors into jokes (‘a helping hand from the long arm of the law’, ‘like impetigo on a honeydew melon’).
Despite the non-stop witticisms, there is a proper plot, and despite Prendergast’s kooky blundering some real detecting happens.
Move over, P G Wodehouse, Douglas Adams.