The Cat Who Saw Stars

The Cat Who Saw Stars is the twenty first Cat Who mystery from Lilian Jackson Braun, published in 1998. By this point in the long running series the formula was firmly established and was most of the appeal. James Qwilleran, the heavily mustached former crime reporter who has settled in Pickax in Moose County, somewhere four hundred miles north of everywhere, gets pulled into another local mystery alongside his two Siamese cats Koko and Yum Yum. Koko, in particular, has the unexplained gift of noticing things that turn out to be clues, and Qwill has long since stopped pretending he does not pay attention.

In this entry Qwill is staying at his summer cabin in Mooseville, the lakeside community that serves as a frequent summer setting for the Pickax cast. The case begins when a young man whose body has washed up on the beach is identified as a backpacker who had been telling everyone in town about strange lights he had seen in the sky. The local conversation about UFOs and unexplained phenomena gives the novel its title and its initial atmospheric flavor. The dead backpacker turns out to be connected to a wider situation that the small Mooseville community has been carefully not discussing, and Qwill’s slow investigation pulls the case into the larger mystery that drives the rest of the novel.

Braun’s plotting is gentle by mystery standards. Violence happens off the page. Suspects are usually pleasant people with reasons to be uncomfortable rather than dangerous criminals with motives to kill. The pleasure of a Cat Who book is the slow accumulation of detail, the warm sense of place, and the quiet humor of Qwill’s observations on whatever situation he has been pulled into. The Mooseville summer setting gives this novel a particular flavor different from the Pickax winter or autumn settings of many of the other entries.

The UFO element in the novel is handled with Braun’s characteristic light touch. The strange lights are not necessarily extraterrestrial in any conventional sense, and the actual explanation that the case eventually delivers fits within the realistic small town crime framework that the wider series has always operated in. Braun uses the science fiction tinged title and atmospheric setup to give the novel a distinctive flavor without actually moving the series outside its standard cozy mystery boundaries.

For longtime fans, The Cat Who Saw Stars is a comfortable summer entry. For new readers, starting with The Cat Who Could Read Backwards is the better entry point.