A seemingly innocuous cat-sitting gig on a hot summer evening leads crime-solving thespian Alice Nestleton into her twentieth murder case when she's attacked, her client is killed, and his cat named Brat is nowhere to be found.

Alice is, as usual, having trouble finding acting jobs, she's sweltering in her apartment, and she can't pass up the offer when guidebook writer Louis Montag wants to hire her to come to his air-conditioned loft and keep Brat entertained so he can peck at his computer keyboard without catly interruptions.

On arrival, Alice is a little uneasy when Montag tells her Brat is out with a cat walker, but she's quite sure something's dreadfully wrong when she's conked on the head and awakens to find Montag hanging from a light fixture. And then the young woman who was out walking Brat the cat is also found murdered, and the cat is missing.

Soon Alice, AKA the Cat Woman, is busily on the case, convinced that the missing cat is the key to the murder. Aided by one of her oddball buddies, the bar-hopping mystery writer Sam Tully (who recommended her cat-sitting services to Montag in the first place), she pores over Montag's guidebook to New York bistros--some of which don't exist anymore--tracks down his onetime paramour, puzzles over mysterious doings involving Brat, and learns about a legendary bad-luck cat and a possible blackmail scheme.

As with all the Alice Nestleton books, the solution is rather convoluted, if not downright silly, requiring a huge suspension of disbelief to accept the motives and actions of the baddies. Though most of the series' formula holds (the murder always, always comes at the end of the first chapter), this time Alice doesn't create an elaborate plan to catch what turns out to be the wrong person, before unmasking the right one. And except for Sam, the generally annoying people in Alice's circle (Tony Basillio, Nora, A. G. Roth, her niece Alison) are thankfully missing. Alice's cats Bushy and Pancho are still around, of course.

A Cat Named Brat is junk food--like the rest of the entries in the series, it's nothing memorable, just the sort of book to grab for a quick read when you've got a little time to kill and don't feel like taxing your brain with much thinking.

And then, too, the cats who stare out at you from the covers of the Alice Nestleton books are just so darned irresistible!