The Maltese Kitten (Sam the Cat Mysteries, No. 3)

Meet Sam the Cat. His fee is a half a pound of lox, plus expenses. His clients are other felines, but he catches human crooks. He's Manhattan's funniest (and furriest) private eye-- or, as one critic put it, "If Philip Marlowe came back as a cat, he'd have come back as Sam." In "The Maltese Kitten," Sam's third adventure, a mysteriously valuable black kitten disappears, a blue-eyed redhead asks Sam to track him down, and he soon finds he's playing in a game of cat and mouse in which nothing, and no one, is ever what it seems.