“Take Eleanor Roosevelt’s advice and treat your curiosity as the most useful gift you were endowed with,” he’d said and then had sent a sly wink toward Lou.
-Eryn Scott, Littered with Trouble
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I devoured Littered with Trouble and then the rest of the series! It’s a cute premise: Lou buys a bookshop and ends up fostering cats as well, giving them literary names and letting people come spend time with the cats in the shop before adopting them. I’m not a cat person, but this was a fun way to add pets to a mystery without the cats being involved in the solving, something that feels far-fetched to me. But, like I said, not a pet person.
Eryn Scott brings the sweet little town of Button to life with great descriptions of the inhabitants, the town, and the interplay with the surrounding area and towns. There’s a map at the beginning of each mystery, a detail that I always enjoy. Reading this one on my Kindle made it a little hard to make sense of some of the map, but that’s just because I have no idea how to enlarge the photo. And, frankly, after I read the first book, I was too impatient to get to the following mysteries to spend much time trying to figure it out.
This was a fun mystery, with lots of twists and turns. Lou, the bookshop owner, finds a man dead in her back alley. He’d been in the shop briefly earlier in the day, but Lou hadn’t talked to him much or found out who he was or what he wanted. To save the shop, she’s on the case trying to figure out what the man was doing and why he ended up dead.
I didn’t figure it out, as usual, but I enjoyed following the different threads as Lou chased down leads, teased out info, and eliminated suspects. That she’s an outsider in town, though not entirely, adds another layer to the story.
The characters are wonderful. The core group is interesting and fleshed out and they mix together well. I can already see the way some things are probably going to play out between some characters, but I’m not at all disappointed by that. It’s going to be fun to watch these other story lines develop.
I tore through the four books that were currently available in the Whiskers and Words series. Each is an entertaining, quick read. I had to wait a few weeks for the fifth book that had a Christmas setting and it was well worth the wait, too!
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