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Cat and a Playing Card
Series · 4 books · 1999-2000

Books in series

The Cat and the King of Clubs book cover
#1

The Cat and the King of Clubs

1999

Classy Van von Rhine finds herself in her dream job - managing the Crystal Phoenix hotel, and her first job is to oversee its renovation. She has no idea that Nicky Fontana, her boss, is a member of a Mafia family. Early on, Van and Nicky can barely tolerate each other, but before long they're swept up in romance. Midnight Louie watches as a silver-haired man appears down the hall from Van's room, and hoodlums try to sabotage the hotel work. Van's dream job is quickly turning into a nightmare, and her love life seems about to follow suit...
The Cat and the Queen of Hearts book cover
#2

The Cat and the Queen of Hearts

1999

In Book 2 of the original Midnight Louie quartet, shy Darcy McGill would love to teach her attractively stuffy writing professor a few things about the real world. When the professor meets Darcy's "showgirl sister" Sirene in her Crystal Phoenix dressing room, the showgirl takes the professor for a walk on the wild side. When one of Sirene's spurned suitors decides he wants her at any cost, can Midnight Louie help the Professor save Sirene and discover which woman he really loves?
The Cat and the Jill of Diamonds book cover
#3

The Cat and the Jill of Diamonds

2000

Pistol-packing poker queen Jill O'Rourke is an Annie Oakley at nailing targets or cards. She needs to be sharp at both, since she secretly supports her desert-rat grandfather and his cronies on her poker winnings—a dangerous profession for a young, pint-sized woman in Las Vegas. Stardusted balladeer Johnny Diamond finds himself a prisoner of fame when a stalker threatens him. Love and death are in the cards, but the jet-black feline house detective known as Midnight Louie sees all, knows all, and gets his paws into the action.
The Cat and the Jack of Spades book cover
#4

The Cat and the Jack of Spades

2000

When a tourist named Gayle meets up with a mysterious stranger named Solitaire at the Crystal Phoenix Hotel in Las Vegas, she quickly learns she isn't in Kansas anymore. A double-dealing pair of hit men send the unlikely couple running for their lives into the surrounding desert. But by the time the sand settles after a desert showdown, both love and money come up winners as Midnight Louie, feline private eye extraordinaire, once again successfully combines the roles of Sam Spade and Cupid.

Author

Carole Nelson Douglas
Carole Nelson Douglas
Author · 67 books

Carole Nelson Douglas is the author of sixty-four award-winning novels in contemporary and historical mystery/suspense and romance, high and urban fantasy and science fiction genres. She is best known for two popular mystery series, the Irene Adler Sherlockian historical suspense series (she was the first woman to spin-off a series from the Holmes stories) and the multi-award-winning alphabetically titled Midnight Louie contemporary mystery series. From Cat in an Alphabet Soup #1 to Cat in an Alphabet Endgame #28. Delilah Street, PI (Paranormal Investigator), headlines Carole's noir Urban Fantasy series: Dancing With Werewolves, Brimstone Kiss, Vampire Sunrise, Silver Zombie, and Virtual Virgin. Now Delilah has moved from her paranormal Vegas to Midnight Louie, feline PI's "Slightly surreal" Vegas to solve crimes in the first book of the new Cafe Noir series, Absinthe Without Leave. Next in 2020, Brandi Alexander on the Rocks. Once Upon a Midnight Noir is out in eBook and trade paperback versions. This author-designed and illustrated collection of three mystery stories with a paranormal twist and a touch of romance features two award-winning stories featuring Midnight Louie, feline PI and Delilah Street, Paranormal Investigator in a supernatural-run Las Vegas. A third story completes the last unfinished story fragment of Edgar Allan Poe, as a Midnight Louie Past Life adventure set in 1790 Norland on a isolated island lighthouse. Louie is a soldier of fortune, a la Puss in Boots. Next out are Midnight Louie's Cat in an Alphabet Endgame in hardcover, trade paperback and eBook Aug. 23, 2016. All the Irene Adler novels, the first to feature a woman from the Sherlock Holmes Canon as a crime solver, are now available in eBook. Carole was a college theater and English literature major. She was accepted for grad school in Theater at the University of Minnesota and Northwestern University, and could have worked as an editorial assistant at Vogue magazine (a la The Devil Wears Prada) but wanted a job closer to home. She worked as a newspaper reporter and then editor in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area. During her time there, she discovered a long, expensive classified advertisement offering a black cat named Midnight Louey to the "right" home for one dollar and wrote a feature story on the plucky survival artist, putting it into the cat's point of view. The cat found a country home, but its name was revived for her feline PI mystery series many years later. Some of the Midnight Louie series entries include the dedication "For the real and original Midnight Louie. Nine lives were not enough." Midnight Louie has now had 32 novelistic lives and features in several short stories as well. Hollywood and Broadway director, playwright, screenwriter and novelist Garson Kanin took Carole's first novel to his publisher on the basis of an interview/article she'd done with him five years earlier. "My friend Phil Silvers," he wrote, "would say he'd never won an interview yet, but he had never had the luck of you." Carole is a "literary chameleon" who's had novels published in many genres, and often mixes such genre elements as mystery and suspense, fantasy and science fiction, romance with mainstream issues, especially the roles of women.

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Cat and a Playing Card