CROW RIVER JUSTICE

A retired lawyer who is murdered and reincarnated as a feral cat must find a way to bring his killers to justice in Stewart’s paranormal thriller.

After 35 years as a criminal defense attorney, William Hawkins retires to the small town of Crow River, hidden in the Canadian boondocks. After his wife Clare dies from cancer, William’s friendship with his neighbor Sandy deepens—she too is wrestling with cancer so painfully debilitating that she chooses to die by assisted suicide. However, before her procedure, she sees William brutally murdered and is then murdered herself, as she is the sole witness to the crime. Then, in a bizarre turn of events almost rendered plausible in this delightfully strange novel, William is reincarnated into a feral cat’s body. William (that’s a human name, so as a cat he either goes by Hawk or Buddy), desperate to solve his own murder, cutely charms his way into the home of his daughter, Jules, a police officer. She doesn’t know William is dead—his body has mysteriously vanished. He types out messages to her on his cell phone with his surprisingly nimble paws, both to get information about the investigation and send her some of his own when he comes upon it. The author constructs a remarkably complex animal world with its own moral code and laws, which William must navigate. It’s not entirely unlike the human one, except for the fact that the “animal world is always at war,” and so allowances must be made for the naturalness of predation. Such a fantastical tale can easily go off the rails into the absurdly contrived or the cloyingly saccharine—the protagonist is a kitten, after all—but Stewart manages to avoid both of these pitfalls. The result is a very funny and inventive novel that manages to achieve something rare: a glimmer of authentic originality.

A deeply intelligent and humorous examination of an anthropomorphized animal kingdom.