Rebecca Hale - Nine Lives Last Forever (2010) How to Moon a Cat (2011)

This is book two and three in the Cats and Curios Mystery series. I'm reviewing them together because I didn't like either very much and I don't think there's much difference between them.

The main problem I had with them, apart from the ludicrously slow moving storyline, is the point-of-view constantly jumping, even in the middle of a chapter. Not just to different people (there were nine in book 3), but to inanimate objects and animals too. It was incredibly confusing and off-putting. Honestly, if I hadn't already bought the books I wouldn't have bothered reading them.

I don't really understand how the author got from book one to these two books. Similar characters, but all a bit of a mess really in the storyline. What is going on gets so confusing because of the constant jumping of viewpoints. If you've never met a character (or tree, rock, statue, frog, cat...) before you're not going to understand that you're suddenly listening to what they're thinking.

I didn't find the characters engaging at all, we just spent too little time with them. The main protagonist could have been killed, along with her cats, and it wouldn't have made a difference to the story.

I won't be bothering with the next three books in the series and these three are off to Goodwill.

Kerry Greenwood - Cooking the Books (2011)

This is the sixth book in the Corinna Chapman series.

I adore Corinna. She's not Goddess-perfect in any way and that makes her one of my favourite characters. Corinna is nice, practical, hard-working, affectionate, loyal, not self-involved, empathic, open-minded, understanding, happy with herself - she's all the things people should be if we lived in a better world. Corinna is all the things that would make a better world.

Corinna is a niche baker in Melbourne CBD who lives in a very eccentric building, Insula, filled with equally eccentric residents. Mysteries come her way and, with the help of her lover Daniel, Corinna sets out to solve them. In this book someone is pranking the lead star of a new television series and it's threatening to end the show. Dramas among the actors and crew mirror the melodrama on the soap and Corinna bakes her way through pettiness and intrigue to find lost children, a nasty prankster and stolen bonds.