School Library Journal Review
YA-Alice, part-time actress, amateur sleuth, and professional cat sitter, has a wealthy new client, Mary. However, Alice gets two significant surprises: Mary is murdered as she turns over Dante, who turns out to be a stuffed cat, to Alice for safekeeping. With the help of Sam, Mary's derelict friend, Alice pieces together each clue to figure out who killed the woman and why. An easy-to-follow plot is presented with humor and lots of dialogue. Alice's dry wit and spirited personality should please teens searching for a quick read.-Claudia Moore, W. T. Woodson High School, Fairfax, VA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Publisher's Weekly Review
Dieting can be murder, as Adamson (A Cat on Jingle Bell Rock, 1997) deftly demonstrates. When Mary Singer begs sometime actress, professional cat-sitter and amateur sleuth Alice Nestleton to board her cat, Alice agrees; the $2500 she's offered for four days of cat care is too good to pass up. But cat-sitting takes a backseat to murder when Mary's Bentley pulls up and her chauffeur calmly shoots her and drives away, leaving Alice with only a large, toy cat with button eyes and wheels for feet. Alice is skeptical when the dead woman's neighbor, Sam Tully, a retired crime fiction writer, suggests that Mary really wanted to hire Alice for her sleuthing skills, but when too many names from her own past seem connected with the dead woman she teams up with Tully. The two gumshoes follow the trail through a steamy New York summer to a shady diet doctor Mary once consulted, to long-forgotten actors and a director from Alice's days in drama school, to a butcher store where Mary transacted large amounts of business, and to a very hostile carpenter. The denouement may be a tad bizarre, but this feisty little mystery has pace and character enough to roll right over such small bumps. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Why would retired accountant Mary Singer offer occasional actress Alice Nestleton $2,500 to board her cat Dante for four days--especially when Dante is nothing but a stuffed toy? It's no use asking Mary, because as she climbs out of a chauffeured Bentley to deliver the button-eyed client to the old warehouse Alice shares with her own two cats, she's shot dead by the liveried chauffeur. If that sounds too bizarre to be believed, it's all on tape, since a passing Canadian tourist, who turns out to be an old colleague and friend of the actor who recommended Alice to Mary, has videotaped the whole murder. No writer could keep up this level of invention for long, of course, and prim Adamson (A Cat on Jingle Bell Rock, 1997, etc.) has soon settled into a soothingly familiar round of quirky caricatures--from Joseph Grablewski, Alice's old acting teacher, who's now on the wagon but not in the clear, to Sam Tully, Mary's neighbor, the hard-boiled writer whose last volume was the well-received Only the Dead Wear Socks. There'll be revelations about the unsuspected past of Alice's old friend Nora Karroll that would rock a more volatile series, but here they cause scarcely a ripple en route to the climactic revelation of what might be called the Jerzy Grotowski diet. In fact, the biggest disappointment for fans of the series (now in its 16th installment) will be the fact that the feline lead is stuffed.
