The Cat and the King of Clubs

Cat and a Playing Card #1

by Carole Nelson Douglas

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...

Genres: Mystery, Romance, Fiction

227 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 1999

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

[Hannah · Rating 2 out of 5]

Fun to read aloud and pretend you're in a noir detective story, but not much beyond that.

[Jeffery Swindell · Rating 3 out of 5]

I could tell this was her earlier books and felt like a crossover from romance to mystery. It set up a lot of things that carried through the other mystery stories.

[Brett Bydairk · Rating 3 out of 5]

More romance than mystery (actually very little mystery), this is a revised edition of a book published in 1985, with more of the original content restored. For those who have read the Midnight Louie books, this is the back story of how the Crystal Phoenix was created out of the old Joshua Tree hotel, and how Van von Rhine and Nicky Fontana met and fell in love.

[Roxanna · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the first in a series of book this author has written. It sets up the place, time, and characters for the rest of the titles. Her writing is young, and not as good as her latest writings. I believe the author got better, and better as she wrote. I do love her latest writings.

[Jessica]

A-Z Mystery Challenge by author: book d

[Dorryce · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book. Stumbled on it in the local library. It sets up the rest of the Midnight Louie books and is well worth the search to find it.

[Theresa · Rating 4 out of 5]

for all cat lovers

[Cathie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fun to go back and read the original quartet that started the series! Adds a little background info, more of a standard romance template.

[Pauline (Polly) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved re-reading this. So glad it was published and then re-published the way the author imagined it. Can’t remember when I first started this series- 2017 or earlier…