Cat Raise the Dead

by Shirley Rousseau Murphy

(Joe Grey Cat Mystery Series, Book 3)

HarperPrism, 1997
(No hardcover edition)
Paperback: Avon, ISBN 0061056022
E-book: HarperCollins
Audiobook: Download, CD, and digital rental

Winner of the Cat Writers' Association's 1998
Muse Medallion and President's Best-of-the-Best Awards!

Animal therapy for the elderly is becoming popular; many groups bring their dogs and cats for such visits to nursing homes. But when Joe Grey and Dulcie take on this helpful work they discover multiple grisly murders. Setting out to track the killer, they are soon in the midst of a dark dimension to the business of caring for our old folks.

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Quotes from the reviews

"Murphy's keen wit and intense love for all animals makes this third novel in her series the best yet. Murphy's style works because she's not afraid to face the seamy, clinical side of detection and forensics, yet there's no manipulation of the reader's feelings just for effect.... If you haven't read Cat on the Edge or Cat Under Fire, you're in for a special treat! Funny, intelligent, fast-paced and sensitive--that's Shirley Rousseau Murphy's "Joe Grey" detective series!" --Library Cat Newsletter, Summer 1997.

Excerpt from the story

Within the dark laundry room she stood to the side of the door's narrow glass, where she would not be seen from the street, stood looking out into the night. The black sidewalk and the leafy growth across the street in the neighboring yards formed a dense tangle, a vague mosaic fingered by sickly light from the distant streetlamp. Pale leaves shone against porch tails and steps, unfamiliar and strange, and beneath a porch roof hung a mass of vines, twisted into unnatural configurations. Beneath these gleamed the disembodied white markings of the gray cat, where it crouched staring in her direction, predatory and intent, waiting among the black bushes for her to emerge again into the night. She steppcd aside, not breathing, moving farther from the glass.

But the cat turned its head, following her movement, its yellow eyes, catching the thin light, blazing like light-struck ice, amber eyes staring into hers. Shivering, sickened, she backed deeper into the shadows of the laundry room. clutching her voluminous black raincoat more tightly around herself, nervously smoothing its lumpy, heavy folds.

She couldn't guess how much the cat could see in the blackness through the narrow glass; she didn't know if it could make out the pale oval of her face, the faint halo of gray hair. The rest of her should blend totally into the darkness of the small room, her black-gloved hands, the black coat buttoned to her throat. Even her shoes and stockings were black. She had no real understanding of precisely how well cats could see in the dark, but she imagined this beast's vision was like some secret laser beam, some infrared device designed for nighttime surveillance.

She could only guess that the cat had followed her here. How else could he have found her? Somehow he had followed the scent of her car along the village streets, then tracked her, once she left the car, perhaps by the smell of the old cemetery on her shoes, where she had walked among the graves earlier in the dav? Such skill and intensity in a common beast seemed impossible. But with this animal perhaps nothing was impossible.

Earlier, approaching the house, she hadn't seen him, and she had watched warily. too, studying the bushes, peering into the late- afternoon shadows, then had slipped in through the unlocked front door quickly. Not until she had finished her stealthy perusal of the house, taking what she wanted, and was prepared to leave again had she seen the beast, waiting out there, crouched in the night--waiting just as, three times before, it had waited. Seeing it, her mouth had gone dry, and she had wanted to turn and run, to escape.

But now the sounds behind her down the hall kept her from fleeing back through the house to the front; she was trapped here.

The cat moved again shifting among the shadows, and for a moment she saw it clearly, its sleek gray coat dark as storm clouds, its white parts stark against the black foliage.

It was the kind of big, square beast that might easily tackle a German shepherd and come out the winner, the kind of cat, if you saw it slinking toward you through a dim alley, ready to spring, you would turn away and take an alternate route....

Read a longer sample from inside the book

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