CATNAPPED

and

CHECKED OUT 

by Elaine Viets

CATNAPPED

Book 13 in the Dead-End Jobs Mystery series 

by Elaine Viets

The fur is really flying in this Dead-End Job Mystery from the national bestselling author of Checked Out.

No more pussyfooting around! Husband-and-wife PI team Helen Hawthorne and Phil Sagemont have barely scratched the surface of the world of show cats when a cornered kitty kidnapper’s claws come out.... 

The one thing celebrity Trish Barrymore and her no-account accountant husband, Mort, can agree on in their bitter divorce is shared cat custody. But when Mort is found brained by a mahogany cat tower and their pedigreed Chartreux show cat goes missing, Trish calls on Helen and Phil to find the feline filcher and let the cat out of the bag.

Discovering that Mort had some shady dealings within cat show circles, Helen goes undercover as an assistant for a woman who shows prizewinning Persians. As Phil and she get deeper into a high-pressure world of primping, posing, and purring to collar a killer, they get caught up in a cat-and-mouse game where the stakes are literally life and death.

MY REVIEW

Unlucky number 13? Not with this thirteenth book in the Dead-End Jobs Mysteries!

While I’ve read a few books in author Elaine Viet’s Mystery Shopper series, CATNAPPED is the first I have read in her Dead-End Jobs series. I could tell from the very beginning that this was going to be a fun book, and it was!

I love the character Helen and Phil, a husband and wife PI team, and Nancie, they lawyer for the firm they work for. Helene and Phil have a great relationship. I love the way they interact with each other. And Nancie, well, she’s a real piece of work. ;-)

I started laughing during the first chapter and kept laughing until the end. Ms. Viets has a wonderful sense of humor. But the humor in her writing didn’t diminish the wonderful mystery aspect of this story at all. It was tight and well plotted with plenty of twists in the story to keep me guessing. A real page turned that kept my brain working on the answer even when I was reading!

Because of CATNAPPED, I now have a new to me series that I will be adding to my TBR. 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

CHECKED OUT

Book 14 in the Dead-End Jobs Mystery series 

by Elaine Viets

Shhh...in the newest hardcover in the national bestselling Dead-End Job Mystery series, Helen Hawthorne quietly goes undercover at a local library to search for a missing masterpiece.

Wealthy socialite Elizabeth Cateman Kingsley has hired Helen to find a missing John Singer Sargent painting, owned by her late father. After his death, many of Davis Cateman’s books were donated to the Flora Park library, and his daughter suspects the small watercolor—worth millions—was tucked away inside one of those dusty tomes.

To search the stacks, Helen applies for a position as a library volunteer and discovers the library director has a catalog of complaints—from a mischievous calico cat named Paris to the mysterious disappearance of various items that some of the more imaginative staff are attributing to a ghost haunting the building.

While her husband Phil sticks his neck out to find a missing necklace, Helen is on her own with no one to lend her a hand. When a dead body turns up in a parking lot, it appears someone is willing to go to any lengths to keep the treasure in the library quiet. Now Helen is bound and determined to find the killer as well as the painting—before she’s taken out of circulation herself.

MY REVIEW

For as much as I liked CATNAPPED, book 13 in the Dead-End Jobs Mysteries, I liked CHECKED OUT twice as much!

Husband and wife PI team Phil and Helen, are working on separate cases in this installment. Phil is searching for a missing necklace while Helen goes undercover as a librarian to find a missing water color, donated by mistake in a book to the library.

Author Elaine Viets has a wonderful writing style that flows so smoothly. She really knows how to draw the reader into her stories. Her mysteries are first rate and the humor she adds to her characters and situations only adds to the enjoyment of the books.

With suspects not being in short supply, I kept changing my mind over who the villain was. I’m proud to say I can sometimes guess who the “baddy” is, but I wasn’t even close with CHECKED OUT.

If you haven’t read any of the Dead-End Jobs Mysteries, I would suggest you check out CHECKED OUT. It will have you adding the rest of this series to your TBR shelves!

Both of these great titles are 

available for pre-order for their 

Tuesday, May 5 release date! 

As always, please leave a comment and 

let me know what you think!

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