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JAMES THE CONNOISSEUR CAT

Harriet Hahn

The delightful crime-solving and aristocratic social adventures of an American antiques expert and a British feline with finesse
It's love at first sight when a businessman visiting London meets a silver-gray cat named James in the lobby of his apartment house. The two begin meeting regularly for cocktailssingle-malt whiskey, neat, for Jamesand attending posh parties, where James first makes a name for himself by cracking the case of a priceless jewel scam.

Soon James is on the prowl, deterring pickpockets on the subway and ferreting out stamp forgeries and counterfeit paintings. In between crime capers, he screens potential tenants, spends the holidays at an ancestral estate in Devon where the crème de la crème of British society anoints him Sir James, and indulges in his penchants for pâté de fois gras and matchmaking with inimitable panache.

Harriet Hahn was born in Gatún, Panama, and grew up in Spokane, Washington. After attending Reed College in Portland, Oregon, she graduated from the University of Chicago, where she met her husband, Charles Hahn, with whom she later worked as an editor of the trade magazine he published in Latin America and the Caribbean. Due to Charles's avid interest in stamp collecting and British postal history, the Hahns traveled frequently to London. On one trip, they stayed at a small hotel that was inhabited by a delightful cat named James, who befriended Harriet and inspired her to write novels about a connoisseur cat.
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Published 2015-02-10 by Open Road Media

Comments

Great fun for feline fiction enthusiasts.

Like the comics Garfield or Heathcliff, the silver cat James, in this excruciatingly whimsical tale of a brainy feline, is a cat only in (what we interpret as) giant ego and vanity. Like his cartoon counterparts, James is merely an irritating human in fur-- but, unlike them, he has classy tastes. The narrator, an agent in the fine-arts business, meets James for the first time in his London apartment house. James, ``owned'' by the building's proprietor, pushes the elevator button to the correct floor. So then it's sharing whiskey (James prefers the best) and pat?--and the adventures begin. James falls in love with a porcelain cat and recovers jewels for Lord Henry, whose romance with the painter Helena--her show is rescued by James, who paints her an abstract piece--has a happy ending in the ancestral home. James spots a false Constable, works for a stamp expert and detects forgeries, evicts obnoxious tenants, appears on TV in Puss 'n Boots, puts in a day or so as an Egyptian god, etc. etc. Ho-hum. An iffy item for the cat fancier (depends on one's whimsy quotient), and a maybe (the fine-arts milieu is rather special) as a juvenile crossover.