Catnapped! by Elaine Viets, New in Bookstores in May 2014

Today's new hardcover mystery title, scheduled to be published during May 2014 by NAL Hardcover, is Catnapped! by Elaine Viets.

For a list of more new hardcover mysteries published this month, visit our New Mysteries page for May 2014. For new paperback mysteries, visit The Mystery Bookshelf where a selection of May 2014 mysteries, novels of suspense, and thrillers are shelved.

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Catnapped!
Elaine Viets
Series: Helen Hawthorne, Dead-End Job (13th)

The one thing celebrity Trish Barrymore and her no-account accountant husband, Mort, can agree on in their bitter divorce is shared cat custody. But when Mort is found brained by a mahogany cat tower, and Justine, their pedigreed Chartreux show cat, goes missing, Trish calls on Helen and Phil. Despite a ransom note from the catnapper, Trish is still the prime murder suspect in the eyes of the police. As they await the post-Mort-em, it's up to Helen and Phil to find the feline filcher and let the cat out of the bag.

Discovering that Mort had some shady dealings within cat show circles, Helen goes undercover as an assistant for a woman who shows prizewinning Persians. But Phil is not buying Trish's cat-that-swallowed-a-canary act — he thinks she might be staging the whole catnapping.

As Helen and Phil get deeper into a high-pressure world of primping, posing, and purring to collar a killer, they get caught up in a cat-and-mouse game where the stakes are literally life and death.