Cozy Mystery Review: Fur Love or Money | Sofie Ryan | Second Chance Cat Mystery #11

Secondhand shop owner Sarah Grayson and her rescue cat, Elvis, sniff out the suspect in this new, delightful Second Chance Cat Mystery from New York Times bestselling author, Sofie Ryan. In Fur Love or Money, a dead body is linked to a man thought to already be dead.

About the Book | Fur Love or Money

Sarah Grayson is taking a break from her bustling secondhand shop in small-town Maine to spend time with a friend and her dog. But their purr-fect visit comes to an end when the dog leads them to a storm cellar on a nearby property, where they discover a dead body.

The deceased turns out to be a sticky-fingered financial adviser who swindled millions from investors and who has been presumed dead for almost three years. Unfortunately, suspicion falls on the owner of the property where the body was found—and that owner is a good friend of Charlotte’s Angels’, the senior citizen sleuths who work out of Sarah’s shop. It’s all paws on deck, as the Angels are determined to clear his good name. But with a tight-lipped widow, a possibly shifty sister, and a slew of unhappy investors in the mix, the list of murder suspects seems endless. Sarah, Elvis, and the Angels have a lot of webs to untangle before they can catch the culprit. (Synopsis from Goodreads)

Review | Fur Love or Money

I’ve always enjoyed the premise of this series (a secondhand shop) and it’s fun to revisit Sarah Grayson in Fur Love or Money. This series is set in North Harbor, Maine and features a great cast of characters. I particularly enjoy that though Sarah is the narrator of the books, her grandmother’s friends are the primary detectives in the stories calling themselves Charlotte’s Angels (Rose is my favorite and also the most prominent).

In the latest mystery, Sarah and Rose are delivering dog treats to Ashley and her dog Casey (Casey had been involved with saving Rose in a previous book). When Casey starts whimpering, the three women follow him to see what he’s bothered by. Casey leads them to a rental property and over to the storm cellar, where Sarah hears a puppy stuck inside. She climbs down a suspicious ladder and rescues the puppy, but before she can climb back up she realizes that what she thought was a bag of garbage is actually a dead body!

It takes a few days before Sarah and Rose learn the identity of the body, and they’re surprised when they hear the victim is Ian Stone. Three years earlier Ian went missing in Ireland after a fall and was presumed dead when his body wasn’t recovered. Of course, the lack of a body and word of an investigation that had been looking into a Ponzi scheme Ian was thought to be involved with led to rumors that he faked his death and his wife Victoria helped him. The money he was thought to have taken was never found, nor was his body (until now).

It appears Ian had been alive all that time and returned to North Harbor for some reason. His wife Victoria had recently remarried, thinking he was dead. Meanwhile the rental property where he was found turns out to have been rented out to a man named Dan Cooper. This is presumably the alias Ian had been living under, and he had false documents to support it. When the owner of the property and longtime friend of Rose is accused of knowingly helping Ian hide out at his rental property, Sarah and Rose become determined to find the real killer.

One thing that I enjoy about Sofie Ryan’s books (and the ones she publishes under the name Sofie Kelly) are that she branches out with her victims and what is being solved. In particular, this is not the first time that she has used a cold case (or at least a victim linked to a cold case) as the central mystery to solve. I was immediately intrigued as soon as I found out that Ian Stone was presumed to be dead.

The investigation is seeking to find the killer, but part of that meant finding out where Ian had been the past three years, who might have helped him disappear (or known about it), and why he would return to North Harbor where he is sure to be recognized by someone. Ryan also drops in fun tidbits, including the assumed name that Ian was using (Dan Cooper) being a nod to the famous D. B. Cooper case. If you haven’t heard of that case I highly recommend looking it up! But clear your afternoon because you will fall down the rabbit hole of theories about the mysterious hijacker who vanished with the money and has never been located.

The mystery kept me hooked and I liked the twists and turns it took as Sarah and Rose hunted for answers. In particular, there is a nugget of information about the killer that narrows down the suspect pool quite a bit. I enjoyed how that tied in at the end of the book when the culprit is caught. The killer is unmasked and the curious cast of Ian Stone is finally closed, with plenty of answers about where he had been and why he came back.

A great mystery that can easily be read as a standalone book (though I recommend checking out the Second Chance Cat Mystery series)!

Thank you Berkley Publishing for my copy. Opinions are my own.

About the Author | Sofie Ryan

New York Times bestselling author, Sofie Kelly (also writing under the name Sofie Ryan), writes the Magical Cats mysteries, set in the small town of Mayville Heights, Minnesota. As Sofie Ryan, she is the author of the popular bestselling Second Chance Cat mysteries that feature repurpose shop owner, Sarah Grayson, a group of senior sleuths and the world’s oldest computer hacker.

Sofie has been a late night disk jockey—which explains her love of coffee–and taught absolutely terrified adults how to swim. Like Kathleen Paulson in the Magical Cats books, she practices Wu style Tai Chi. Sofie is also a mixed-media artist and likes to prowl thrift shops looking for things to re-purpose in her art.