Cat in a Neon Nightmare

Midnight Louie #15

by Carole Nelson Douglas

Cat in a Neon Nightmare is the fifteenth Midnight Louie mystery, and this tough-talking tomcat is as feisty as ever, raising hell (sometimes literally) in Las Vegas, America's Sin Capital.

The lavish hotels and the sham of wholesome fun may soothe the tourists, but sex and greed still fuel this town, and bad guys still abound. And Midnight Louie, the feline Sam Spade has his paws full keeping those he loves safe
.
This time Midnight Louie treads the lurid side of mystery's mean streets when a call girl named Vassar is found lying dead on the neon ceiling above a Las Vegas casino. Suicide or homicide? If straight-arrow radio shrink Matt Devine, the man most likely to have been Vassar's unlikely last client, is charged for Vassar's murder, everyone Louie knows is an accessory to the crime . . . except for his ever-loving roommate, PR whiz Temple Barr, who has been kept in the dark by both friends and enemies.

To save Matt's future, Temple will have to crack the cover-up with the unsuspected help of Midnight Inc. Investigations, now including a junior Louie's maybe-daughter, Midnight Louise. Meanwhile, a hot new club in town, Neon Nightmare, has links to the mysterious Synth, a sinister association of magicians that may lie behind the string of unsolved deaths that have haunted Louie Company for months.

And with the psychotic stalker, Kitty the Cutter, still prowling, death is definitely in the cards for someone Temple knows very well, and not even Louie may be able to stop it.

Genres: Mystery, Fiction, Cats, Cozy Mystery, Cozy, Suspense, Romance

384 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 2003

About the author

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.

Reviews

[Joan · Rating 4 out of 5]

The fifteenth book in this series continues the Las Vegas adventures of Midnight Louie, Midnight Louise, Louie's human roommate, PR expert Temple Barr,Temple's magician boyfriend Max, and her friend and neighbor, ex-priest Matt Devine.

Midnight Louise heroically takes a wild motorcycle ride, Midnight Louie comes to her rescue, and the humans solve a couple of the outstanding murders in the series.

The usual humor and soul-searching add to the adventure.

[Michele · Rating 4 out of 5]

Definitely was not expecting the death of the character who died...glad I have the next book in the series in my hand!!

[Crystal Karre · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent

[Roxanna · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book. A lot of issues came to a close but others opened
up for new beginnings.

[Cathy · Rating 5 out of 5]

very interesting. love Midnight Louie's perspective as well as Midnight Louise. And the characters are very interesting as well, Temple, Max, Matt, and Kitty the Cutter.

[JSchafer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Midnight Louie is a misogynist - rather believable for a male tomcat but hard for me to read.

[Carol · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the fifteenth book in the mystery series. The protagonist, Midnight Louie, is a black cat of extraordinary perception. He lives in Las Vegas with his red-haired human roommate Miss Temple Barr, a PR person. When a high-class call girl dies in a fall at a hotel the police don't know if she fell, jumped, or was pushed, but they lean toward the last. Several chapters give the human action from the point of view of Miss Temple or one of her human friends. Interspersed are chapters narrated by Midnight Louie who, with his erstwhile daughter Midnight Louise, gather information from the animal kingdom and solve the mystery. Louie is a tough-talking street-wise feline who knows what he is capable of and becomes a very adorable detective. Who, by the way, shuns dry cat food in favor of oysters.

[Rebecca · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's a miracle I even finished this book. If I had anything else going on, I would have tossed it out the window, but I actually finished it. It was so weird. I think this was part of a whole series of books, but this one was from the middle and I had no idea what was going on for most of it. And part of the book was told in POV from a cat?! I mean, so freakin' weird! It was a sort of murder mystery, but I didn't know what the hell was going on. And two of the Dudes were named like Matt and Mark and I couldn't tell them apart at all. Only read if you like really stupid murder mysteries.

Grade: D- (I shouldn't really give it a grade at all, but this is me)

[Leslie · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is probably my last Midnight Louie. The lack of mystery and the angst of the characters is just not worth the read. This one was a little better than the other two I read, but only because the cats were in the biggest part of the story. To my relief, the main character, Temple, who is supposed to be the detective, hardly appeared at all. Not that she did any detective work in any of the three books I read.

[Nicole · Rating 3 out of 5]

Douglas did a good job of introducing all of the characters since this is about #14 in the series. But with all of that aside. I think I needed to read some of the earlier ones to get a better picture of the whole stories. Read a lot like a soap opera, but the good kind. Now I want more of these, but in moderation.

[Freud's Nightmare]

I stopped at page 28 when it became quite clear that this book would probably be better if I read one or two of its predecessors first. I may come back to it later. - June 15, 2009

[Debra · Rating 5 out of 5]

I just love my Midnight Louie novels...

[Beverly · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book didn't quite grab me the way earlier ones did. I enjoyed Midnight Louie, of course, but got tired of Matt's overly utilized guilt. Not enough Temple in the plot.

[Franklin · Rating 1 out of 5]

your mom is my ghostwriter.

[Toesnorth's mom]

didn't read