Cat Screams (a Hugh Rennert Mystery)

When Mura the Siamese cat screams, Death is sure to strike! At Madame Fournier's quarantined pension in Taxco, Mexico's fabled "silver city," Death remorselessly stalks new prey. Among these confined guests-the actress on the run, the playboy in pursuit, the disagreeable newspaper columnist, the New York artist, the archaeology professor, the enigmatic matron and the highly discreet gentleman from Dallas, Texas-who will live and who will die? Can Hugh Rennert, U.S. Customs Service agent and something of an amateur detective, unmask a murderer and end a deadly rampage? Are the killings really the work of a Nagual, a human who can take animal form? Why won't the Mexican house servants, Esteban, Marie and Micaela, tell what they know? When The Cat Screams, the second Hugh Rennert mystery, originally appeared in 1934, Todd Downing's eminent American publisher, Doubleday, Doran's Crime Club, proclaimed the novel "one of the most unusual mystery stories the Crime Club has ever published." With The Cat Screams, Todd Downing had fashioned a plot that was spellbindingly exotic yet also "plausible and logical." Doubleday, Doran chose The Cat Screams as a monthly Crime Club Selection, an honor only very rarely granted an author new to its list. Don't let the screaming of Mura frighten you away. . . . Read The Cat Screams and see for yourself why as a literary stylist Todd Downing was "far superior to the average mystery writer."