Book Spotlight (and a Giveaway!): A Night’s Tail by Sofie Kelly

A NIGHT’S TAIL
SERIES: Magical Cats #11
GENRE: Cozy Mystery
PUBLISHER: Berkley
RELEASE DATE: September 3, 2019
PAGES: 288

In the charming town of Mayville Heights, librarian Kathleen Paulson and her two cats pounce on clues to catch a killer, in the eleventh installment of this New York Times bestselling series.

Spring is coming to Mayville Heights, and Kathleen’s brother, Ethan, has arrived in town with his band, The Flaming Gerbils. But not everything goes as scheduled when one of Ethan’s bandmates gets into a fight with a man interested in investing in the town. When the businessman’s body is later found, Ethan’s friend is implicated in the crime.

Kathleen wants to help her brother by solving the case, but she has no shortage of suspects from which to choose. Prior to his death, the investor was fighting like cats and dogs with lots of people. If this librarian wants more than a whisker’s chance of solving the case, she will need to rely on her trusty feline sidekicks, Owen and Hercules.

We stayed for the band’s second set and then headed home. Brady offered to drop off Milo and Derek at the bed-and-breakfast where they were staying but it was a nice night—clear and just a couple of degrees below freezing and they decided to walk down. Marcus, Ethan and I squeezed into the front seat of my truck.

“Is there going to be kissing?” Ethan asked, when I pulled in the driveway at Marcus’s house. He squished his face and pulled his shoulders up around his ears. He was sitting in the middle between Marcus and me.

“Yes, there’s going to be kissing.” I leaned across him, covering his eyes with one hand, and gave Marcus a quick kiss.

“I’ll call you after practice,” he said.

Marcus was helping coach the girls’ high school hockey team. They were just one win away from making it to the state finals.

I nodded.

“Good to see you, Ethan,” he added and climbed out of the truck.

“Is it safe to look?” Ethan asked. I’d already dropped my hand. He opened one eye, squinting at me. “I don’t want to see anything that might scar my psyche. I’m very sensitive.”

“You’re very something,” I said. I straightened up and put the truck in gear.

Ethan slugged my shoulder with a loose fist and laughed. “C’mon, Kathleen, you know you’ve missed me.”

“Like a root canal,” I countered as I backed out of the driveway. “Like fingernails on a chalkboard.” We’d been doing this routine for years.

“Do they still have chalkboards?” Ethan asked.

“Like a colonoscopy. Like Mom’s hot cross buns.” Our mother’s hot cross buns were legendary. They looked like they belonged in an issue of Bon Appétit. But they were harder than a concrete paver. Dad had literally chipped a tooth on one of them, although as far as Mom was concerned the tooth had a weak spot and the fact that it broke when he took a bite of—or at least tried to take a bite of—one of her hot cross buns was just an unfortunate coincidence.

Ethan narrowed his eyes at me. “Ooooh, Mom’s hot cross buns. Burn.”

I glanced over at him, head back against the seat, fingers tapping a rhythm on his leg that only he could hear, and I was hit with a wash of homesickness, like someone had just upended a bucket of water over my head. I missed them: Mom, Dad, Sara and Ethan, even though he was right here beside me.

It wasn’t easy being so far away from Boston, from all of them. Not that my family were always in Boston. Ethan was on the road a lot with the band. Sara’s work as a makeup artist and filmmaker had her traveling more and more, and while Mom and Dad were teaching, they still went where the acting jobs were, which in my mother’s case meant Los Angles a couple of times a year for a recurring role on the daytime drama The Wild and Wonderful.

On the other hand I had a life now in Minnesota, a life with Owen and Hercules, my cats, with Marcus and Maggie and a group of friends I’d miss just as much as I missed my family now if I went back to Boston.

“Hey, I never did ask,” Ethan began. “Did you know that dipwad in the bar?”

I shook my head. “No, I don’t know him, at least not personally. He’s here in Mayville Heights to maybe start a business.”

“You get some interesting people in bars,” Ethan said. “When we played in Chicago this woman got up on her chair, whipped off her shirt and started dancing. Then she yelled at me to come give her an autograph.”

“I think that makes you a certified rock star,” I teased, “being asked to autograph a woman’s bra.”

Ethan raised an eyebrow just the way I sometimes did, à la Mr. Spock from Star Trek. “I didn’t say she had a bra on under her shirt.”

“Ewww,” I said with a shudder. “Now my delicate psyche is scarred.”

Ethan shook with laughter. “She was wearing a tank top. And I signed the back of it!” He spent the rest of the drive home sharing all the weird things he’d been asked to autograph, including a bald guy’s head and the top of a toilet tank. I laughed so much I got hiccups and I forgot all about drunks in bars.

Excerpt from A Night’s Tail used by permission

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Sofie Kelly writes the New York Times bestselling Magical Cats mysteries that feature librarian Kathleen Paulson and her two very special cats, Owen and Hercules, who have a magical knack for solving crime. As Sofie Ryan she is the author of the New York Times bestselling Second Chance Cat mystery series. She lives on the east coast with her husband and daughter.

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(1) Prize Package including a hardcover copy of A Night’s Tail, a paperback copy of The Cats Came Back, a copy of Color a Cat (a drawing and coloring book) and a sweet surprise.

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