The Contorted Figure

 

The ninth entry of P.C. Hatter’s Kaiser Wrench series of mysteries opens with the first-person tiger narrator analyzing a dead mutt under the scrutiny of a hostile Red River hog officer named Lohman, before he moves on to the mansion of the lapine Zelikow family, whose heir Norman is missing. The family offers Kaiser a reward for finding him, and the tiger has a fling with one of the manor’s servants, the vulpine Celia Clement, who had the stage name of Candy Weaver. Wrench goes to a bar to gather some information, but as has happened to him in many prior books, someone knocks him unconscious.

It appears at first as though Kaiser’s mission is complete, with none other than Norman Zelikow stirring the tiger awake, with another mystery in the form of the name Ackroyd. The body count gradually piles during the course of the novella, with Wrench getting the state police involved, and finding that a female albatross named Natalie Shore owned the meat cleaver responsible for one of the murders, thus becoming a prime suspect. Kaiser also develops a friendship with the coyote officer Sergeant Collins, and searches old newspapers in his continued search for clues, with some surprise twists culminating towards the end of the story.

All in all, this was definitely one of the highlights in the Kaiser Wrench series, given its clear mystery to solve and surprising turns of events, not to mention the appeal to members of the furry fandom such as myself, although it does have some of the same issues as its predecessors such as the poor editing job with many prominent errors, mostly in punctuation, although I actually found it slightly easier this time around to keep track of the species of the various luminaries throughout the novella. The mature themes also definitely appealed to me, and I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend this story to those that enjoyed its precursors.