Sat 7 Sep 2019
Archived PI Review: KAREN KIJEWSKI – Katwalk.
Posted by Steve under Bibliographies, Lists & Checklists , Characters , Reviews[5] Comments
KAREN KIJEWSKI – Katwalk. Kat Colorado #1. St. Martin’s Press, hardcover 1989. Avon, paperback, 1990.
Sacramento PI Kat Colorado does a favor for a friend, a newspaper advice columnist named Charity, and tries to find out where the woman’s soon-to-be-ex-husband has stashed away a missing $200,000. The trail leads to Las Vegas, and lots of violence.
Very little of this is a detective story, per se, as most of the guilty parties are identified early on. Kat makes a few mistakes along the way — going it alone, not thinking of consequences — otherwise she’s the perfect epitome of feminine toughness.
The Kat Colorado series —
Katwalk. St. Martin’s 1989. Shamus winner (PWA) for Best First PI Novel; Anthony winner for Best First Mystery.
Katapult. St. Martin’s 1990
“Katfall” Sisters in Crime 3, 1990.
Copy Kat. Doubleday 1992
Kat’s Cradle. Doubleday 1992
Wild Kat. Doubleday 1994
Alley Kat Blues. Doubleday 1995
Honky Tonk Kat. Putnam 1996
Kat Scratch Fever. Putnam 1997
Stray Kat Waltz. Putnam 1998
September 7th, 2019 at 8:36 pm
Read and enjoyed this one for what it was, but ultimately I wanted at least a pretense of a mystery plot.
September 7th, 2019 at 10:18 pm
I read one or two others, but at the moment I couldn’t tell you if her detective plots got any better or not. She was quite popular for quite a while, though.
September 9th, 2019 at 12:30 am
A lot of times for me, and especially in the late eighties and early nineties, my criteria was that if a series was good, but not great, and just missing something I thought it needed. I just didn’t feel like nursing it along to see if it got really better. In general I followed enough reviews, ARMCHAIR DETECTIVE, and such and was in correspondence with a number of booksellers and writers so if a writer did something outstanding I could always opt in and find the earlier books in the series.
I probably missed some good choices then, but for the most part I was able to keep up with what interested me. That was also a period when I had some international sources and was acquiring harder to find books and paying a little less attention to what was flooding the market locally, which right then was private eyes of all kinds.
September 9th, 2019 at 3:40 pm
How this won any awards is about as inexplicable to me as Adam Sandler’s career (see below). I hated every page of it, I despised the lead character, and I’d rather watch one of those movies with Sandler and Rob Schneider than read another one.
September 9th, 2019 at 4:00 pm
I’ll put you down in the Didn’t Care for It column, Jeff.