Mon 17 May 2021
KAREN KIJEWSKI – Kat Scratch Fever. Kat Colorado #8. G.P. Putnam’s Sons, hardcover, June 1997. Berkley, paperback, June 1998.
In her next-to-last recorded outing, Kat Colorado is hired to help determine if a well-known insurance agent committed suicide or not. The police think so; the man’s lawyer is not so sure, and his widow, a much younger woman, is completely distraught. Thinking it an extremely minor matter, she takes the case, but 350 pages later, both she and the reader have gone though a figurative wringer.
It’s a long and complicated case, in other words, and there are times when a list of characters after the title page would have come in very handy. (Do mystery novels ever do that any more?) It seems as though everyone in Sacramento has a deep dark secret that they’ve been keeping forever, and somehow a blackmailer, the same one in each instance, has managed to unearth all of them.
What’s different this time around is that all of the money — $10,000 at a time — goes to charity, a foundation that grants wishes to disadvantaged kids, and with one exception, the blackmailer does not come back for more. But when Kat’s investigation gets too close, he (or she) has no hesitation in striking back, in more ways than one.
Kat Colorado was a PI definitely in the Kinsey Millhone mode. For each of these two female Pis, their friends and family get all tangled up in the tales about them, and in this case for Kat, deeply involved in the case itself as well. Both tell their stories in a consistent conversational tone, and snarky and wittily at times as well, but if you prefer the loner type of detective, you’d best stay away.
Another possible flaw for you, as a potential reader of this book, may be in the detective work, if you perceive it that way. When Kat eventually comes to a dead end, as indeed she must, as none of the blackmail victims are willing to talk, her only recourse is to offer herself up as bait. We’ve all read that sort of recourse before, but you can’t convince mystery writers to do otherwise, since as smart as the killers always are up to then, it’s a ploy that always works.
May 18th, 2021 at 6:08 am
I read – unfortunately – the first book in the series, KATWALK I believe, and the only remembrance I have of it after 30+ years is how much I hated it and the main character. Don’t believe any of the Kinsey Millhone comparisons you’ll read on Amazon. She is no Millhone, and the book sucks, big time.
May 18th, 2021 at 11:14 am
I believe you have told me so before! The early Kinsey Millhone books were very good, excellent even, but at some point in the alphabet, they tailed off badly. It has its flaws, but I found this Kat Colorado entry leagues better than anything Grafton wrote after T or so.
May 18th, 2021 at 3:14 pm
I remember reading that she stopped writing these when her publisher wanted to stop the hardbacks and make them paperback originals.
May 18th, 2021 at 3:59 pm
And therefore (perhaps) at a reduced royalty rate for the same amount of writing? Or less prestige? It’s a possibility I hadn’t heard before. I’ve always assumed that when her contract ran out, her publisher didn’t offer another. Either way, the end of the series seemed to come very very suddenly.
May 18th, 2021 at 7:51 pm
My experience was pretty much in line with Jeff Meyerson’s with these. That episodic television style plotting mentioned in the last paragraph of the review is a good example of what turned me off. I found it fairly typical of the series as a whole.
I really require a little more effort from a series.
May 19th, 2021 at 9:12 am
I’d imagine, Steve, it was the lack of prestige afforded to paperback originals. At least, that was my impression.
Whatever ego or pride was involved, it may have been a big mistake as many such novels from the 1990s are stil going strong today. Several have even been adapted to television by Hallmark (there are a mammoth sixteen and counting Aurora Teagarden films, for example).
May 19th, 2021 at 11:58 am
True enough, but for a mystery writer to stick around waiting for a TV deal is about the same as trying to win an odds against PowerBall lottery ticket, even with so many streaming services out there now looking for product.
But it does help if you are writing cozies, anything that will catch Hallmark’s eyes, and while there’s a lot of extraneous family and friends in the Kat Colorado books, what they definitely are not are cozies.
May 19th, 2021 at 4:05 pm
That’s certainly true. The public seem to think a TV deal is inevitable when it’s in fact extremely rare. And even if it does happen – which might take decades – cancellation may quickly follow! I feel sorry for any writer who has experienced that.
May 20th, 2021 at 9:35 pm
I imagine several of the writers on here have at some time or another had something in “development” for television. Mine was a series for Roger Corman when he was doing original material for Showtime I created with another friend based on a short story of mine. We see/sawed back and forth for half a year until Corman and Showtime parted ways.
Most writers don’t even get a toe in the door to get it slammed on. We only got that far because my friend was a friend of one of Corman’s producers.
Considering the major writers who barely were considered for some sort of filmed tie in to their work it’s not really that good a bet. Keep in mind at one point Agatha Christie went over a decade between adaptations of her work (between AND THEN THERE WERE NONE and the first Miss Marple with Margaret Rutherford). That’s a pretty long dry spell for the number one bestselling fiction writer of all time.
May 21st, 2021 at 1:14 pm
That’s very interesting, David. It must be crushing when such projects don’t work out. Or maybe it helps a little just to come close.
A pet peeve of mine, though, is when one of my friends has read a book and says that it would make a good film, as though a book isn’t enough somehow. And you never hear the opposite either: “This film would make a good book!” 🙂