CAT IN A WHITE TIE AND TAILS is Carole Nelson Douglas' twenty fourth Midnight Louie mystery. Midnight Louie is the title cat, a former television star who's spending his retirement keeping an eye on his favorite humans: Temple Barr, public relations guru for a Las Vegas casino, and her fiancé, former priest turned talk radio personality Matt Devine. When the trio travels to Chicago for a family affair, Midnight Louie is kidnapped, and has to use all his Vegas street smarts to get back home.

That's a large part of the book, but it's just a teensy part of the overall plot.

This is the first Midnight Louie novel I've read, and unlike many mystery series that I've started in the middle, I felt that I was at a disadvantage. Douglas tries to get new readers up to speed, with a Midnight Louis monologue to start and explanations smattered throughout, but it's all very complex. You have Temple's amnesiac ex-boyfriend Max Kinsella, a magician slash spy, who's investigating his own "death" and the mysterious woman he met in Europe who's turned up in Vegas; a bunch of unsolved murders; a whole gang of cats who are following everyone around; a disappearing and unidentified corpse...

Yes, very complex.

I enjoyed the writing for the most part. Midnight Louie has chapters in his own voice, and I sometimes found it hard to follow his train of thought. Ditto for the chapters told by Louie's young protégé Midnight Louise. When it worked for me, I liked it. When I had to re-read a sentence to figure out what they were trying to say, I didn't.

I like Temple, Matt, Max, and their cop/former-cop friends C.R. Molina and Rafi Nadir. I was very intrigued by the arcing plots about the Synth, the Irish Republican Army, and the mob. If you can, I would recommend reading the other twenty three Midnight Louie mysteries first, so you're not, like me, trying to figure it all out as you go along.