Satan Reviews- Books: The No. 2 Feline Detective Agency

The No. 2 Feline Detective Agency

Mandy Morton

Allison & Busby

Spoilers

This was certainly a different book.... For one thing, it's not at all obvious when it's meant to be set. For example, a lot of things suggest the book was set in the 50's/60's, such as what read as references to Marilyn Monroe and the descriptions of the vehicles, but then VHS players are mentioned I think, which weren't invented until the 70's. The world building was just questionable in general. Are there police in this world? They left a dead body in a room for days and never told anyone about it. Is there cutlery in this world? The cats can hold pencils but they don't seem to have forks... Is it because Hettie and Tilly are too poor for forks?

I don't understand the whole cat thing at all. At first I thought it was a metaphor or something, but I soon realised that these characters were actual cats. I was confused, to say the least. Names were usually cat puns and I wanted to die a little.

Most of the jokes made weren't funny. They often came off as a little sad and it felt like the author was trying too hard.

The book also kinda read as just a little racist. The only cats that were obviously written as not white were stereotypes that could be easily read as offensive. Lotus Ping spoke "Engrish", i.e. "quickerly" and Malory I think that's her name, there were so many characters that they started to blur together, who was written as a black, Jamaican woman, drugged old people with weed.

I also have questions about where they get the meat based food from because no other animals apart from fish are mentioned in the entire novel and they're eating steak and kidney pie not forgetting the whole plot point about cat fur being used in accessories, the fur coming from skinning dead cats that had just been buried but yeah...

The culprit/ reason the dead cats were being taken was really obvious somehow. I was legit joking in my head and I was right. I was like, "what's the most fucked up reason for this?... I know using their skins for clothes or something. lol... Oh.... WTF?!"

Also, the plot finished a good while before the book did. You found out the culprit, they died and then there was still 50 pages in the book or something and I really was wondering why the book was still going. Then, the sister who was dead was actually in a coma and had survived what read as over a week without food and water because filler that happens after the plot. Also, the sister just straight up murdered her sister and no one seemed that concerned. She straight up yelled about killing someone at a funeral and people were like, "we should probs keep an eye on her." Not "maybe we should send this person somewhere because murder is a crime and she's clearly unwell."

Plus the fact that most of the book was filler. You want to know who committed the crime? Well too bad, here's Tilly being concerned about VHS tapes. Still want to know? Well, here's Tilly's backstory that literally no one asked for. Still wondering about the culprit? Now Tilly is working in a charity shop. I did not care about a good proportion of what happened in this book.

I don't think I could read the other book in this series if it was anything like this one.

I gave this book one star out of five.