Blood on the Cat by Nancy Rutledge – #ReadingTheMeow2026

I had forgotten that Reading the Meow 2026 was coming up until I started seeing blog posts appearing, and I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to fit anything in. I also couldn’t think what to read, since I had gathered up all the obvious candidates on previous iterations of Mallika’s event. And then – Blood on the Cat by Nancy Rutledge came through the door! It was published in 1945 and is now being reissued as part of Penguin’s American Mystery Classics series. I’ve had a few of these sent, but this is the first I’ve managed to get to – and even if it weren’t for Reading the Meow, I might not have been able to resist the stare of the cat on the cover. This is Smoky – and let me assure you that Smoky survives the book without injury. I’d put money on her to survive a war. Here is how she opens the first paragraph of the book: Smoky’s eyes shone yellow and green in the rainy darkness, but her body was only a black shadow punctuated by a dot of white at the tip of her tail. She slid around the…