Miss Rachel Murdock has an odd habit, namely using the premise of wanting to rent a house to get a free ride around the city in the rental agency’s car taking her to and from a property. When she is tokenly inspecting a property in Beecher Street, she spots something very concerning – a girl in the neighbouring garden, standing over the grave of her recently murdered pet toad.

Deciding that this bears sticking her nose into, Miss Rachel decides to rent the house – to be fair, she is concerned about the girl, Claudia, and the sort of evil ne’er-do-well who would step on a toad. But when the body of Claudia’s great-grandmother is found in the basement of the house, and the house seemingly getting broken into on the hour, every hour, it seems there is something exceptionally nasty lurking in Beecher Street.

Book club time – this is the second in Dolores Hitchens’ Cat mysteries (the first was The Cat Saw Murder) and the first that I’ve read. And it’s probably the last as well.

It’s kind of hard to put my finger on what I didn’t like about it – I just couldn’t settle into the book, and not just because Miss Rachel’s cat ISN’T BLACK!!! Or that she doesn’t seem particularly concerned when the cat gets attacked. If anyone touched one of my cats, I’d go ballistic, but she doesn’t seem to be remotely concerned – it might be because the person who did it is probably still in the house.

And the fact that basically everyone in the book seems to break into the house at some point, it just gets a bit tiresome. On the face of it, it’s a whodunnit, but it feels more like a heroine-in-peril sort of story, peril which you could argue she is basically asking for.

All in all, I just didn’t get on with this one and even after writing that, I can’t really put my finger on why, apart from a lack of empathy with the sleuth and the repeated “there’s someone in the house” cliffhangers. It might just be that I’ve got other books that I want to read – I was halfway through a new release when I realised that I’d forgotten about Book Club so had to put that one on hold – and I’ve got a bunch of review ARCs that I want to get to, so maybe I didn’t give this the attention it deserved. Or maybe it just wasn’t for me…