A Cat in the Manger

A Cat in the Manger is a 1990 cosy mystery by Lydia Adamson and the first book in the Alice Nestleton series. The detective is a middle-aged actress who earns money looking after other people's cats, and the series' premise is that the work keeps bringing her into contact with homicides.

The plot moves between New York City and Long Island and takes in horse racing as well as pet sitting, so both sets of animals in the title are material to the story. When a client is murdered, the actress's professional contacts turn out to be the way into the case, and the book stays at the domestic scale the series works at: a small cast, a short list of suspects and a solution that depends on what she has noticed rather than on procedure. The horse-racing material also puts the novel at the edge of the sports mystery rather than squarely in the drawing-room tradition. It is the first of the Alice Nestleton series, and its detective is a middle-aged actress rather than a professional, which is why the cases reach her through the animals she is paid to look after.