The cat's out of the dead bodies are piling up in Brimful Coffers, a picturesque English village. Among the deceased is Boswell, a pet white rat. His killers were Had-I and But-Known, two mischievous felines belonging to Lorinda Lucas, mystery writer. Unfortunately, the other victims were all too human-and their killer remains at large... The danger in Brimful Coffers was unforeseen when several authors created an informal writers' colony in this lovely town outside of London. In act, the location was heaven until the undesirables-critics and scholars-began to show up. Soon Lorinda and her friends feel as if they're living in a fishbowl. Worse, they're getting chilling threats, supposedly from their fictional characters! But when fatal "accidents" begin to claim the colony's residents, death isn't make-believe. And unless Lorinda can sniff out the killer, even a cat's nine lives might not be nearly enough...

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...