Bye, Bye Love

February 23, 2015
Early in Larsen’s lively fourth Cat DeLuca mystery (after 2013’s Some Like it Hot), Cat, the owner of the Pants on Fire Detective Agency in suburban Chicago, and her dog discover a body in a local park. Tucked into the corpse’s pocket is a money-filled envelope addressed to Joey DeLuca, Cat’s uncle, a Ferrari-driving police officer with questionable ethics. The killer returns to the scene, shoots Cat with a Taser, and drugs her; when she awakens in the park, the body is gone. Despite warnings from the police, she investigates—while juggling family
commitments. She initially appears so bumbling that her solution of the case, based on clues missed by savvy cops, seems unlikely. The loud, large DeLuca relatives are entertaining but one-dimensional supporting characters, and Cat’s devotion to dogs is endearing. Still, an overabundance of chick-lit tropes and too many similarities—including a cheating ex-husband and a car bombing—to Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum series keep this title from standing out.

April 1, 2015

It's not unusual for PI Cat DeLuca to see a corpse or two, but she doesn't always literally run into them as she does at the start of her fourth adventure from Larsen--the collective pseudonym for sisters Kari, Julianne, and Kristen Larsen. Bodies also don't usually contain personalized notes. But it's all in a day's work for this Chicago-based gumshoe, back for another round of crime fighting after 2013's Some Like it Hot.

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 1, 2015
Running in the park with her beagle, Inga, Chicago PI Cat DeLuca literally trips over a body. As she is checking for identification, she finds an envelope, with a significant amount of cash, addressed to her Chicago-cop uncle, Joey, and knows she needs to protect him from Internal Affairs. And then she's Tasered. By time she comes to, the body is missing, and the cops say there's no case. The Ninth Precinct's Captain Bob refuses to acknowledge that there is a case and disses Cat and her agency. Cat sets out to prove Captain Bob wrong and bring in the killer, getting significant assistance from Uncle Joey and her brother. Along the way, she also faces the first meeting between her boyfriend's parents (vegetarians) and her parents (steak lovers); the church wedding foregone by her parents 35 years earlier; and several attacks, even when she's accompanied by her hunky FBI-agent boyfriend. The twists and turns in the plot hold to the end, coupled with more than one laugh-out-loud scene, culminating with the '80s-style wedding.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)