“Midnight Louie is the funniest, hairiest, hard-boiled PI on the planet.”—JANET EVANOVICH Readers are biting their nails as Carole Nelson Douglas’s popular alphabetic Midnight Louie feline PI mystery series nears its end with the 27th entry coming Aug. 25, Cat in a Zebra Zoot Suit. A final entry will follow the “Z” book: Cat in an Alphabet Endgame. Even then, Vegas’s hairiest sleuth (whose feline-noir voice has been compared to Hammett, Hammer, and Nathan Detroit) will not be hanging up his fedora. In Cat in a Zebra Zoot Suit, Louie’s roommate, petite powerhouse PR freelancer Temple Barr, discovers a nudie strip club opening in a nearby empty building threatens her elderly landlady’s wedding chapel business. Electra’s Lark’s troubles go supernova with a murder charge for a death that echoes a bizarre slaying decades earlier. While Temple’s fiancé, Matt Devine, ex-priest radio shrink, plays detective with a rough crowd getting rougher, her ex, magician and counterterrorist Max Kinsella, dodges IRA remnants in Ireland, where psychotic liar Kathleen O’Connor leads him to his cousin, presumed dead from a pub bombing years earlier. All the investigators’ pasts draw them into shocking revelations and present peril. Once, wearing a zoot suit could get a man killed. Temple and Louie must solve why a forgotten fifties night club, Zoot Suit Choo-Choo, is a now a nexus of death and greed. “So in this typically fun-filled, witty and comic Midnight Louie outing, Douglas tackles a multitude of serious and topical issues [including] sexual responsibility and familial responsibility, theology, stalking, sanity and lack of same, honor and commitment, and the keeping of vows and trusts.” —M0STLY MURDER on Cat in a Flamingo Fedora