Marian Babson – författare

The last thing eleven-year-old Robin wants to hear is that his mother and her new husband are extending their honeymoon indefinitely. Not that staying with his Aunt Mags is so bad, but there’s her boyfriend to contend with, and the members of the school gang are insisting that he complete a dare before they let him join the group. They want Robin to kidnap Mrs. Nordling’s prize-winning cat when no one is home.

Getting into the Nordling’s house is easy, and Robin manages to find the cat and put him in his bag. As Robin is leaving, however, he stumbles upon a terrifying scene—Mr. Nordling leaving the master bedroom with blood all over his body. Robin is momentarily paralyzed and then flees down the stairs. He can’t be sure whether or not he has been seen, but realizes that in order to stay safe, he will have to hide the unusual-looking cat.

Meanwhile, Mr. Nordling is getting desperate. He knows that if he can find the unmistakable cat he will also find the witness to his brutal crime. He begins a frantic search for the young boy, but his infuriating neighbor won’t leave him alone. She is beginning to understand what happened that night, and he decides that he will have to deal with her too.

In her thirty-sixth published mystery, Marian Babson delights readers again with her usual charm and lighthearted humor. To Catch a Cat will capture the hearts of feline lovers and mystery fans alike.

Returning home to England from New York, Margot finds her family in chaos. Her cousin Chloe is in prison awaiting trial for murdering her twin sister Claudia, their mother has withdrawn into the imaginary world of her romance novels, Claudia’s fourteen-year-old daughter has regressed to early childhood and refuses to leave her bed, and to top it all off, the family cat has decided to live with the neighbors.

As Chloe’s trial approaches, the atmosphere in the house becomes increasingly fraught, and Margot begins to wonder whether someone else is responsible for Claudia’s death. Is Chloe taking the blame for the family’s sake? It’s not until a second murder that the pieces begin to fall into place and the cat agrees to come home.

A decomposing body … a severed head in a closet … a macabre meeting with “Mother”—mystery writer Lorinda Lucas tosses yet another paperback in the trash, appalled at the gruesome direction of today’s crime fiction. She’s even more disturbed at the half-starved state of Roscoe, the cat next door. Before Lorinda left for her latest book tour, Roscoe was as plump and pampered as her own two felines, Had-I and But-Known.

It only takes a modicum of sleuthing to find out that in Lorinda’s absence Roscoe’s owner, Macho Magee, has acquired a new girlfriend—a harridan who has put the gentle Macho and his pet on a strict diet. And that’s only the first disturbing news in Brimful Coffers, the once-quiet village that now includes a writer’s colony. Lorinda soon discovers that a hit-and-run has ended a child’s life, professional jealousy has taken a deadly twist, and murder is just around the catty-corner …

A purrfect crime!

Dame Cecile Savoy’s “revolting floor mop” of a Pekinese has passed away at a ripe old age. Now, the aging British actress convinces her rivals on stage and screen, Trixie and Evangeline, to support her in her hour of grief … by accompanying her to a taxidermist. But it’s a cab ride straight to a cat-astrope!

No sooner do the three elderly thespians enter “Stuff Yours” than they discover a dead body, a live kitty in a cage, and flames bursting from the back room. Fortunately for a rare Japanese bobtail called Cho-Cho-San, Trixie grabs the cat before fleeing the scene. But who’s the victim? Who set the fire? And why was a gorgeous feline going to be stuffed?

Of course, Cho-Cho-San knows more than she’s letting on as the curtain goes up on foul play, murderous jealousies, and a killer who may be going to the dogs …

Marian Babson brings back theater actresses Trixie and Evangeline in No Cooperation from the Cat, her latest cat-suffused cozy!

Trixie’s daughter Martha has taken up residence in the kitchen she shares with her friend Evangeline. Martha is frantically testing last-minute recipes to meet the deadline for her cookbook, helped by Jocasta, her overworked editor. When a strange man bursts into their lives, it’s revealed that Martha was not the first choice for the cookbook, and that the woman originally working on it died after eating something at a cooking demonstration. Unwanted guests descend on the already crowded and tense apartment, one of whom ends up dead. Cho-Cho-San, the lovely Japanese bobtail cat, joins in the fun as Trixie and Evangeline become entangled in another puzzling murder.

Babson delivers a delightfully witty mystery with a cast sure to induce laughs, including one cat that will steal readers’ hearts.

The prolific and delightful Marian Babson has penned another stupendous cozy for cat lovers.

Vanessa has been rushed to hospital, having been found unconscious at the foot of the stairs. Was it an accident or something else?

Now, smiling weakly, suffering from a head injury that has left her with complete amnesia about the fall, the events leading up to it, and even the people closest to her, here she is, back in their midst. Or is she?

In fact, the real Vanessa is still in a coma, and her devoted twin brother Vance, superbly disguised as a woman, has taken her place! At the home of the reclusive millionaire who maintained Vanessa, Vance joins the self-absorbed retinue, determined to discover whether one of them had attempted to kill his sister.

There is an unsavory roué who claims to be Vanessa’s lover and assorted women who declare themselves her best friends. Others keep silent but seem to be waiting for Vance to put a foot wrong.

Actually, Vance can handle all those. Only one thing really worries him: Gloriana, Vanessa’s beautiful Angora cat who regards her “mistress” with a dark suspicion. If the cat can’t be won over, then the whole deadly charade will fall apart.

Only the Cat Knows is part of a long line of wonderful mysteries offering Babson’s special mix of mayhem, murder, and cats!

The outcry when Conan Doyle pushed Sherlock Holmes over the Reichenbach Falls and the dismay when Freeling shot Van der Valk are nothing compared to the chaos that ensues when Lorinda Lucas tries to dispose of Miss Petunia and her siblings, Lily and Marigold. Not only does the lid blow off the fictional village of St. Waldemar Boniface, but the literary colony of Brimful Coffers is shaken to its foundations.

Old feuds are resurrected and new feuds are born as a town full of mystery writers begins to wonder if life has imitated art or vice versa. Even the cats, Had-I, But-Known, and Roscoe, become embroiled and add their share to the motives for murder and frayed nerves in the community.

Nashville’s Bart and the Cousins, in England on a road trip, have a chart-topping song. Unfortunately Bart also has an indictment back in the USA over an underage groupie. Keeping that hot news out of the London papers is a job for Doug Perkins of the PR firm Perkins and Tate. Doug soon finds that you can take the boy out of the country … but he’s still going to run after jailbait. And when Doug thinks the situation can’t get any worse, secrets about love and money start emerging faster than sad notes from the band’s toothless harmonica player.

What’s really going on among Bart and the Cousins is a shocker, but even a spin doctor can’t cover up its deadly consequences. Instead Doug may have to turn from PR to PI … and figure out who committed murder.

A sophisticated mystery involving a series of baffling, random killings, all committed by very bizarre methods, stumps a police investigation unit during the hectic Christmas holidays.

At Maude Daneson’s rooming house, the holiday season has everyone bustling about in anticipation, and Maude herself is planning a glorious Christmas dinner.

But neither the landlady nor her lodgers realize that a killer walks among them. The police have so far been unable to track the culprit—and when murder strikes close to home, it threatens to chill the festive mood.

Doug Perkins doesn’t dislike cats—he just isn’t especially interested in them. But the struggling young London public relations firm Perkins and Tate can’t afford to be choosy about the jobs they take. So when Doug is asked to do the PR for a glorified feline extravaganza called “Cats through the Ages,” he doesn’t hesitate. But it isn’t long before he wishes he had hesitated.

There are some very valuable cats on exhibit—even a few feline celebrities. Then the robbery of a gold statue of Dick Whittington’s cat sets nerves on edge. The theft is not exactly a PR man’s dream, but this disaster pales in comparison to the gruesome murder that follows. Someone has knocked unconscious the show’s organizer, the universally despised Rose Chesne-Malverne, and pushed her into a cage with a pair of feral tigers fancifully named Pyramus and Thisbe—with predictably fatal results. Now it’s up to Doug to find an elusive killer who appears to have nine lives of his own.