Nobody is just a cat lady.
Kit McCafferty’s life is quiet, unremarkable and filled with cat hair. In the magical city of Coldstream, located on the border between Scotland and England, Kit is viewed as little more than mildly eccentric and mostly harmless. She passes her days caring for her family of five cats, feeding the local feral moggies, and maintaining relatively good relations with her neighbours.
All that changes, however, when a teenage werewolf shows up at her door in the desperate hope of renting out a nearby vacant flat. Kit knows that the smart move is to tell him to leave. The last thing she needs is to become embroiled in complicated shapeshifter politics. But something about the secretive young werewolf tugs at her heartstrings.
It’s not long before Kit ends up caught in a maelstrom of mysterious crime and magical wrong-doing. Fortunately, there’s far more to Kit McCafferty than meets the eye and she has a few dark secrets of her own.
Of course, anyone with an ounce of intelligence knows that you underestimate a cat lady at your own peril.

‘Waifs And Strays‘ is Helen Harper’s latest Urban Fantasy novel. It kicks off a series with the (for me) irresistible title: ‘The Cat Lady Chronicles‘ featuring the inimitable Kit McCafferty, a cat lady living in Coldstream, a town on the border between Scotland and England, populated by supernaturals of all types. Kit leads a quiet life renting rooms in her house and feeding feral cats but, as the tagline says: “No one is just a cat lady‘.

I wolfed this down in a couple of days. It was tremendous fun. A good plot, engaging characters with complicated histories, a fully imagined supernatural world and a lot of cats. Humour lubricates the plot but never drives it. This is a thriller/mystery designed to introduce Kit and her world and keep the reader on the edge of their seat while doing it.

Helen Harper’s Urban Fantasy series range from the dark and tense Bo Blackman series (which I highly recommend and which has now been issued as a 55-hour-long audiobook containing all six novels) to the light humour of The Lazy Girl’s Guide To Magic. The new series steers a path between the two.

Kit is not who she seems to be and is not typical Urban Fantasy heroine material. I enjoyed finding out who she had been and watching her being pulled reluctantly from the quiet life she’d intended to have in her retirement.

The plot is a nice mix of tension and humour. I was kept guessing at how things would work out right up to the last page and the final resolution made me smile.

The supernatural world is rich and the magic systems are thought through. And then there are the cats – who make everything more interesting.

I’m looking forward to the second book, ‘The Dark Hiss Of Magic‘ which is expected to be released in June this year. I’ll be going for the audiobook version as Ruth Urquhart’s narration brings the book alive.