Oh Olivia: A Calico Cat Mystery Book Review

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Welcome to my stop on the Great Escapes Virtual Book Tour for Oh! Olivia: A Calico Cat Mystery by Patricia Fry. Stop by each blog on the tour for interviews, guest posts, spotlights, reviews and more!

Oh! Olivia: A Calico Cat Mystery

by Patricia Fry

I received this book free; however, all opinions are my own. This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive compensation at no cost to you.

Oh! Olivia: A Calico Cat Mystery
Cozy Mystery
1st in Series
Publisher: ‎Matilija Press (May 19, 2021)
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 254 pages

Olivia proves she’s not just a pretty face.

Parker Campbell, an investigative reporter, and her calico cat, Olivia, have been summoned to help save a long-standing cat colony site from the grips of eager developers. They arrive on scene to discover that the property has become enshrouded in a most unsettling mystery. The feral cats are digging up personal items belonging to missing persons who vanished years earlier. Was this the site of a mass murder, a cult ritual gone wrong, or an unexplained phenomenon? Parker teams up with Detective Judson Caldwell, who has taken a personal leave to secretly investigate the mystery, and soon learns what drives his obsession with this case.

Olivia, the sweet and sassy calico, struts her stuff in this story. She locates a lost toddler and ends up getting herself arrested. Olivia isn’t about to take this insult lying down, however. She escapes from custody and trashes the police station. Olivia alerts Parker to trouble when they visit her aunt’s home and find that the woman has detained a burglar in a most unusual way. Olivia also finds major clues in the convoluted cat colony mystery, one that promises a glimmer of hope for a long-grieving parent.

My review of Oh, Olivia: A Calico Cat Mystery

Oh, Olivia: A Calico Cat Mystery is a cozy with a great premise. Cats in a protected cat colony have been digging up items from people who all went missing seven years ago. But their colony is being threatened by developers. Since main character and investigative reporter Parker and her cat Olivia have helped with things like this before, she jumps at the chance to help out. It’s when she get there that she finds out about the items showing up, and this puts a tight deadline on solving the mystery since the developers are starting soon.

The missing persons case isn’t the only mystery in Oh, Olivia: A Calico Cat Mystery. Olivia helps locate a missing child and a person from Parker’s family’s past shows up at Thanksgiving. Who is she and does she have ulterior motives in showing up? Though the missing child mystery is solved quickly, and we do find out who the person from the past is, the main mystery is not solved in this book. That’s something I was not expecting, and I kept looking at my Kindle to see if I’d missed some pages. If you’ve read the author’s Klepto Cat series, you were probably aware that there are cliffhangers in her books. But, if you haven’t, this is important to know if you’re not a fan of unresolved mysteries in books.

I enjoyed trying to figure out what happened to the missing people along with Parker, her friend, and others. The cat colony aspect added an interesting aspect to the story too. If you like your cozy mystery books with cats and cliffhangers, and if you’ve read the Klepto Cat Mystery books, Oh, Olivia: A Calico Cat Mystery might just be a book and series to add to your TBR piles.

About Patricia Fry

Patricia has been writing for publication for over 45 years. The first Calico Cat Mystery will be her 94^th published book. But she didn’t start out writing fiction. She had a passion for writing nonfiction articles, and she wrote hundreds—maybe thousands—of articles over her career for around 300 different publications including, Woman’s World, Entrepreneur, The Toastmaster, The World and I, Western Horse, Cat Fancy, Cats Magazine, Los Angeles Times Magazine, Your Health, Writer’s Digest, and many, many others.

Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s she wrote columns, articles, and books for authors teaching about the business of writing. She presented workshops for authors and gave presentations in dozens of cities throughout the US.

In 2010, she wrote her first cat book—Catscapades, True Cat Tales. The following year she shifted from writing nonfiction and teaching, counseling, and mentoring other authors and she wrote the first in the award-winning Klepto Cat Mystery series, CATNAPPED. This series is 51-books strong as of April 2021 and counting.

Patricia is past president and director of SPAWN (Small Publishers, Artists, and Writers Network—now WPN, The Writers and Publishers Network). She is a professional member of the Cat Writers Association since 2009, and she has been writing a daily blog—Catscapades since 2009.

Patricia has almost always had a cat at her hearth and in her heart, loving many mixed breed cats as well as a Himalayan, a Persian and a Siamese. She prefers the long-to medium haired cats, but she has also shared her home with short-haired cats over the years. All but two of the cats she’s had over the years were adopted. Several of them were rescues and some of those came from feral beginnings. Every one of her cats had a story and those stories sometimes appear in the mysteries she writes.

Currently, Patricia shares her home with Sophie, a seventeen-year-old classic formerly feral tortie, and Olivia, the gorgeous diva calico featured in the Calico Cat Mystery series.