- Peter Heilmann
- Man’s second-best friend—or vengeful Egyptian deity?
“Kitty was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that.” Incidentally this is not the opening line of Nine Lives, a new thriller by George Moser, but no matter! We’re ordering up a review copy on the strength of a press release about the book we received a little while ago:
“Michael Merlino leads a charmed life. With a beautiful family and a top job, his existence is blissfully free of struggle, free of worry and most of all, free of meaning. But Michael’s luck is about to change and not for the better. When his father dies he leaves Michael a strange inheritance: a cryptic message and an old car. Michael assumes that the bizarre bequeathment is just the last act of a befuddled old man. So when he feels a gruesome crunch under the tire of his car he believes it to be nothing more than an unfortunate and messy accident. But the kitten Michael crushes under his wheels is no ordinary feline; it is the spirit of Leo the Egyptian cat god, a powerful and malicious deity bent on taking its vengeance.”
Does “an escalating game of cat and mouse” ensue? It does! No word yet whether any of the chaos involves Toxoplasma gondii, which is one way that cats inflict their vengeance; most of the terror here is from the spirit world. According to FakeCat_Fancy, the Vatican’s already formulated its response.