During a blizzard, at three in the morning, Private
Investigator Eli Paxton gets a surprising phone call from
his friend, Lieutenant Jim Simmons from the Cincinnati
Police Department. There's been a murder and Eli is asked to
go to the scene of the crime, but it's not for the murder
itself. In a posh area of the city, millionaire Malcolm
Pepperidge was shot twice in the back while out on his
balcony, gazing at the stars.
Eli is hired by Mrs. Pepperidge, who doesn't care one iota
who killed her husband; she wants him to find her cat
Fluffy, which went missing the night of the murder. Although
it seems like finding a needle in a haystack, the cat is
rather easily found at an animal shelter, where an unknown
man brought her, and Fluffy is returned to her rightful
owner. To his astonishment, Mrs. Pepperidge shouts at him
because Fluffy does not have her collar, and she fires him
on the spot!
Needless to say, Paxton is perplexed; he goes to a diner to
have a bite to eat while mulling over the recent events, and
a big man comes over and sits at his table: Val Sorrentino,
a rather shady character from a Chicago family. The victim
was once known as Big Jim Palanto, financial advisor to the
Mafia, who had left the Family on good terms to start his
own business. That's when Eli learns there is much more to
Big Jim: when his new business didn't go so well, he got
involved with a Bolivian drug cartel where he skimmed off
money and bought 10 million dollars' worth of diamonds,
which were hidden in the cat's collar. Sorrentino suggests
they team up, find the diamonds, and share the insurance's
finder's fee. In spite of his chosen profession, Sorrentino
seems on the up-and-up, Eli's car is in dire need of a new
transmission, and the cases have not been coming his way
recently. Since he doesn't have anything better to do, he
somewhat reluctantly accepts the mobster's assistance, and
the unlikely partners are off to find the missing diamonds.
At first glance, CAT ON A COLD TIN ROOF seems much like your
typical 50s film noir or pulp fiction: Eli Paxton is a slob,
lives a cheap apartment, is often late with his rent,
doesn't do technology, but he's very, very good at his job.
This is just about where the resemblances with old detective
stories end. Mr. Resnick's prose is so fluid and easy, you
simply go along for the ride until the intricate and
meticulously constructed plot keeps you glued to the page.
The characters are very well developed, colourful and
endearing, even those who would seem unlikely to fill the
part. CAT ON A COLD TIN ROOF is the third book in the Eli
Paxton Mysteries series; the author was new to me, and I'm
very pleased to say that I am most definitely looking
forward to the next book in the series!
Hard-luck gumshoe Eli Paxton is hired to find a missing
cat—a very important cat, it turns out, because its collar
is studded with diamonds worth a small fortune. What starts
as a routine search of animal shelters soon becomes a
perilous journey through a murky underworld. The woman who
hired Paxton is the wealthy widow of a recently murdered
financial adviser with an alias and mobster ties.
Eli finds the cat, but not the collar. Eventually, he’s
forced to unravel an intricate plot involving a Bolivian
drug cartel. On top of all this, the temperamental widow is
more likely to throw things at Eli than pay him for his
services.
As he turns up one clue after another, leading him ever
deeper into a treacherous maze, Eli hopes, first, to
survive, and then to make enough money to afford a new
transmission for his broken-down car.
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