Selina Kyle/Catwoman's up to her usual tricks stealing flashy cars and precious items until she runs into a couple of new characters and gets caught up in a dark and disturbing plot where she's forced to adopt the role of - gasp - hero!
The first new character is Spark, an ambiguously good/bad chap whose powers are, anyone? Yup, electrical sparks! He's also a thief and a looker so he and Selina team up (in more than one way) for a few heists, including an attempt to boost some valuable knives from the Penguin and wind up protecting him from a Talon, one of the Court of Owls' zombie-like assassins. The one-shot Night of Owls crossover issue is maybe the best part of the book but the rest isn't bad - but it's not particularly amazing either.
The second new character and villain of the book is Dollhouse, a weird dreadlocked organ-harvesting serial killer who's been abducting and imprisoning Gotham's youngest prostitutes for various reasons, one of which is to make them human-like dolls after their insides have been sold. Catwoman decides to stand up to Dollhouse and become the white knight for this book, a role she's more or less often cast in albeit not being quite as noble as Batman as she tends to steal and kill a bit too.
Dollhouse is a weak villain, who turns out to be the offspring of the Dollmaker, the dreary villain from the godawful early New 52 Detective Comics run, and she turns out to be as boring. Creepy yes, but not particularly interesting. She's crazy, she's evil, that's about it - not a complex figure despite her kooky macabre treatment of her victims.
Spark turns out to be even more boring. He's really there to set up Catwoman's partner Gwen so that she's in Penguin's debt for a future story (you'll see what I mean if you read the book). He's sparky, he's a thief, he's boring and forgettable.
In a book where the villains fall far short of fascinating, the focus should then be on the heroine and her development in the book. Alas, we learn very little about Catwoman that we didn't already know - the one "new" angle is that she's being more or less the good guy in the Dollhouse story which gets undercut when Batman has to save her in the end. So even Catwoman as a character feels a lot less capable and resourceful in her own title! What happened to the Catwoman from the first book who managed to survive fighting a superpowered villain who tossed her around the sky?
Speaking of the first volume, it took the time to establish Catwoman as emotionally damaged who steals out of an instinct for survival and to escape her past, but that side to her is never really explored further in this book. In the first book, she had this great scene with Batman (no, not that one!) where he tried to turn her away from her criminal path with the scene ending in Selina's emotional response where she yells out her frustration at Batman. In this book, Winick tries that again but between Selina and Spark (when Spark's asking her why she cares about prostitutes being murdered) and it does not work - the emotional punch isn't there and the scene plays out as a weaker, more forced imitation of the first book's scene.
Judd Winick's a good writer but his second Catwoman book feels like he's on autopilot and the book never reads more dramatically than a made for TV afternoon detective movie wishing it were edgier but never coming close to achieving it. Guillem March is still drawing Catwoman with flotation-device-sized boobs but otherwise his work in this book, like the first volume, is solid.
Catwoman's still her reckless, thrill-seeking self, cheerfully breaking the law while saving the occasional life, but her character in this reboot initially promised to be far more complex and interesting than it's become in this volume. "Dollhouse" is an ok Catwoman book, just don't expect anything above your run-of-the-mill vigilantics.