I found the mystery to be too obvious, and the writing style was simplistic and off-putting. Conversations lack the simple flow of real dialogue and read, instead, like people spouting facts back & forth. The conversations between the animals were weird as well, even after extra consideration for being conversations between animals. This line, for instance, where one animal finds a tube of sunscreen:"Hmm, Harry must have dropped it last summer. She rarely uses sunscreen. She should but, well, she gets busy and forgets those things."Forget for a moment that this is a cat worrying about skin care, but this isn't how any creature thinks. This is internal dialogue for the woman that lost the sunscreen being put into the mouth of a cat, for no purpose. If the cats are going to simply be substitute mouthpieces for the scattered thoughts of their owner, why have the cats at all?Another thing that bothered me about the writing was a little small, but common. Very often a line of dialogue is followed by a short description of the dialogue just written, which doesn't sound bad, but in practice, this (simulated, because I can't be bothered to find a real example):"I'm sorry." She was apologetic.Is just annoying.Also, the climatic scene (view spoiler)[is just brutally violent when compared to the rest of the book. It just comes out of nowhere. Maybe I should have been tipped off by the occasional profanity, but it felt like a very sudden tonal shift to me. (hide spoiler)]
This was the first one of this popular series by Rita Mae Brown that I have read. It may not have been the best place to start. The author had done a lot of research into viniculture and diseases that affected grapes and the story was a little heavy on factual discussions on these subjects. This might have worked had the information been more clearly tied to the mystery itself, but it was not. The mystery was in fact rather simple, but events and motives were linked together without any hint of explanation or connection: the reader knew there was a problem, but the critical steps of how one starts with assumption A and finds evidence to support conclusion B were lacking. At other times, he author went overboard in over-explaining small emotional details that had little relevance to the actual mystery. In short it was an odd mix of too much information about nothing and not enough information to support the critical points in the development of the story.It was not a bad book, I did enjoy reading it, but there was little meat and little to remember.
What do You think about Sour Puss (2006)?
This was more like the earlier books that were my guilty pleasure. I took quite a long break because the last few books literally made me angry. If I'm going to read a book with talking cats and dogs, I want to escapte from reality, not read all about the author's personal gripes. But this was better. There was less ranting about the government, although a bit of conspiracy theory popped up now and then. Not the best writing in the world--it still feels a bit like a book report in spots where the author's research is rather unelegantly and clunkily inserted into the story--but if you take it for what it is, the book was entertaining. Just what I was looking for.
—Amanda
In her Acknowledgements section Brown makes mention of her exhaustive research into grapes and the diseases that prey on them. It seems to me that she was so proud of her newfound knowledge she hammered in a plot around page after page of scientific mumbo jumbo. Fascinating to chemists and vintners, perhaps, but deadly dull to yours truly. Brown’s strong opinions come out thinly disguised as conversations between her characters. Between that and endless grape minutia, I found myself skimming roughly two-thirds of her newest book. Maybe that’s why I was able to finish it so quickly.
—Janet
I think it is cute that Rita Mae Brown give co-author credit to her cat Sneaky Pie Brown! How cool is that? The discussions between the animals gave this book real flavor. We get to learn the thoughts of Mrs. Murphy and Pewter (cats), Tucker (dog), plus that of an owl, possum, snake, and a mule. The main human character is a lady named Harry, a retired postal worker who spends her time tending to her farm and solving mysteries.This was a fun read with pretty good mystery elements. The only thing I didn't care for was the overabundant speil of agri-information concerning grape cultivation, vine diseases, horse raising, and biochemical warfare. I felt it was a bit heavy on those parts. I still enjoyed the book, though.
—Tina Hayes
