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The story that follows is a series of mishaps experienced first by the dogs in spying over this intruder and in their attempts to discover his secret while at the same time guarding the animals of the farm. Its not easy to keep a secretive cat under their surveillance while fulfilling their duties as guards, especially a sneaky cat like this one.
Eventually they discover what the cat - Tuxedo, is up to and why he came to their area. Tuxedo, manages to enlist their help in his mission. I don't want to give any spoilers here so I won't say what they are up to other than to tell you that they are led into a variety of adventures in order to complete their task. Many of them are quite humorous.
Because the story is well written I am giving it 3 out of 4 stars. It was an easy read and the plot was an enjoyable one and there were a number of laughs along the way. The characters were well developed, both the human and the non-human ones. Actually there were far more four-legged characters than two-legged ones and the author did an excellent job of giving suitable characteristics to all the various animals that we encountered. Some were quite humorous. From the very beginning she introduced some mystery with the appearance of the cat and we were curious to find out what he was up to. Then once we knew what his objective was we cheered him, with the help of his two canine assistants, on to victory.
I could not quite justify a four star rating though for this reason. The story was told completely from the perspective of the animals, which I was fine with. But animals that can not only talk, but write, type, make phone calls and work a computer is just a little bit of a stretch for me. They talk about the Animal Law that forbids them to let humans know what they are able to do to explain why we are not aware of these abilities in animals and to possibly make one wonder just how much they really are capable of but I am sorry I just can't suspend belief to quite that extent. Also I found the final scene of the book just a bit over the top in the description of how the main characters managed to escape.
I would recommend this book if you enjoy a light read and especially if you enjoy stories told from an animal's perspective. She did a great job.
***
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