“A solitary woman takes stock of her life while baking eccles cakes. An antiques dealer pursues a strained, halting romance. A vulnerable man feels conspiratorial forces pressing in from all sides. The wide river runs. Cats scurry about in the night. A fire burns.

The Cat Looked Back, the sixth entry in Louise Carson’s Maples Mystery series, is a story told primarily through texture and atmosphere. Rather than any grand, slowly revealed conspiracy, the reader finds the actions of many flawed humans, added up into a subtle clamour of suffering. Prudence Catford Crick, a housekeeper, long-separated from her criminal ex-husband, leads a life fundamentally governed by shame. As she finds herself compelled to undergo an arduous journey towards emotional clarity (due in large part to the arrival of one Bertie Smith, Montrealer antique specialist), the death of an elderly woman and the near-death of another shake the foundations of her world. Prudence lives in Lovering, a rural community whose dynamics of insularity and uncomfortable interwovenness are expertly captured by the author. Here we find a brusque, almost abrasive lack of curiosity about much of the world--a remarkable amount of time, for example, is spent with characters expressing a deep-seated antipathy towards the idea of single-origin coffee--but also immense beauty, demonstrated through what are frequently disarming descriptions of gardens, orchards, alleyways, old houses, baked goods, and cats of all shapes and sizes. 

The most fascinating thing about Prudence Crick, and perhaps about The Cat Looked Back, is how the difficulty of her emotional processing suffuses itself throughout the whole of the novel. With all the exterior emphasis on pastries and cats, I will admit that I went into the book expecting something at least relatively light-hearted, but what I discovered instead was tense, even claustrophobic. Not just the deaths, but a number of the important dialogue moments occur off-screen, as it were, and in their place the reader inhabits the oppressive contours of Prudence’s psyche. When she began to open herself up towards the end of the book, it felt like I was coming up for air. This is a great achievement on Carson’s part, although not of the kind that I would typically associate with the cozy mystery genre.

In terms of style, The Cat Looked Back is thoroughly sound with a number of exquisite elements. As mentioned earlier, these occur mainly as descriptions of scenes--Carson’s care for the mundane aspects of life shines through in these moments, and it is a greatly enjoyable experience for the reader. The few parts of the novel which struck me as stylistically dull stemmed mainly from heavy-handed efforts to make the book accessible. In particular, an outside-the-narrative sentence which explained that Beaver Lake is a small pond in Montreal (after Bertie Smith had mentioned the lake in passing) grated on me for several pages afterwards. Such hand-holding displays a real lack of trust in the reader, who could easily have been counted on to either look the lake up or else assume Bertie’s statement to be coherent as part of their immersion in the narrative. In this moment and a handful of others, I could not help but notice the book’s conceptual strain, as a psychological maelstrom wrapped superficially in a soothing blanket.

The Cat Looked Back is a very particular book, sonorous and multifaceted, comprehensively dripping with tension. It is resplendent with sugar and water, cats and coffee, deception and death. It is more than worth reading if one desires either a fanciful escape or a ruthless interrogation of the self; however, one will only leave fully satisfied if they desire both, at the same time, with all the strange disjunction that involves.”

— Ethan Vilu Filling Station

Read the full review at Filling Station

“Crime doesn’t pay but maybe crime fiction does? Murder mysteries are one of the top sellers in Canada, along with sci-fi. The Cat Looked Back by Louise Carson is categorically a mystery, but this is ultra-low stakes and a way to pass the time, not a thriller or suspense. That a murder may have occurred doesn’t come up early or preoccupy the narrator or text. Like the 1990s series The Cat Who by Lilian Jackson Braun, the novel is about sinking into a context. Whereas Braun may devote a book to heraldry and Scottish kilt customs, or what it takes to make a cupcake business, The Cat Looked Back is more general, observing the ambiance of quietude on the white edge of the Oka crisis. 

This cozy murder series is in its sixth instalment. The story has in part returned to the Quebec village of 5000 people, Lovering, where most people are related, even if a few generations removed. There’s a lot of time spent on genealogical connections that I found distracting. As with The Last Unsuitable Man by Louise Carson (Signature, 2022), a character is writing a novel, making it a little meta about process, including the wry commentary of perils of using people in your actual life as character models.

The A plot of The Cat Looked Back starts in the aftermath of happiness, the upswing of three pairs of new relationships, including reminiscing over a garden wedding from the point of view of the house cleaner. The B plot is a travelogue of the house owner, as she and her fellow travel the U.K. Both plots are set back in time — are you, reader, old enough to remember those dingy dungeons of smoke and bubble gummed tables of internet cafes? The inclusion of the B plot presumably keeps readers connected with the previous narrator of past novels in the series while providing peppy snapshots that reset the brain stem which may be troubled by the A plot with its characters in conflict. 

Because there isn’t any fallout for the main character pottering around, and observing people, there isn’t any tension ratcheting. Hence, the book makes for a more leisurely read than say, a Louise Penny novel which also seeks to spotlight Quebec cuisine, genial local businesses and people’s deep inner life.  There are no clues of whodunit. There is no impact on the coterie of characters. It’s offscreen what the motivations and consequences of the death are. There are however calming scenes for foodies describing how to cook certain dishes (indexed at the back).

It’s funny, for this reader, throw in vampires and werewolves, and I can suspend disbelief for ghost characters. Where it is like Animal Farm and all animals talk, I can suspend disbelief for the point of view of non-human characters, but given only one animal with an inner monologue, it clogs my filters. As it falls on me, I feel too strongly the hand of the writer adding back story. For that reason let me add a caveat: Some sections of the novel are fronted with a segment from the point of view of a cat, often interacting with a ghost. If you aren’t a fan of ghosts or animal narrators, or sustained pages of italics, this might not be for you, or you could skip these italicized mini-sections.

The A plot narrator is at an emotional remove from everyone. She needs to be unflappable and she nearly gets “flapped” once, primly bailing from what could be a romantic moment. I can’t speak to whether this is part of a transformation trajectory over the series to come.

It may be social commentary that the cats have more explicit longing, love, and expectations than any human expresses. I mull the implications, truth and weight of that. The loose story leaves room for omissions to ponder. After all, the title does suggest it was always about the cats and their memoir as it related to contact with humans. To pivot the importance of a story to decentralize humans might be what our world needs to heal itself from environmental irresponsibility. Watching what’s happening in the peripheral vision to not-us and caring more about that.

At the risk of a spoiler, if you like cliffhangers, and dislike, Happily Ever After, this might have too much resolution for you. If comfort is your dish, you’ll dig it. ”

— Pearl Pirie The Miramichi Reader

Read the full review at The Miramichi Reader.