The Cat Laughs

Gerry Coneybear has her hands full. Between her work as a cartoonist and children’s book author, raising one-year-old Dot with partner Doug, and caring for the 19 cats her late aunt left her--along with the rambling old house known as The Maples--life in the village of Lovering on the Ottawa River is anything but quiet. Add a busy social calendar, and Gerry is already stretched thin.

So what does she do? She signs up for a three-month, once-a-week art conservation internship in downtown Montreal. It’s chaotic, yes--but also invigorating. Gerry Finds purpose volunteering at a women’s shelter, strikes up a friendship with a homeless man, and starts to notice a troubling pattern of thefts--small and not-so-small--back home in Lovering.

Theft is one thing. But when a suspicious death rocks the village, Gerry and her faithful friend Prudence are once again pulled into a mystery with deadly consequences.

Born in Montreal and raised in Hudson, Quebec, Louise Carson studied music in Montreal and Toronto, played jazz piano and sang in the chorus of the Canadian Opera Company. She has published eighteen books: three collections of poetry--A Clearing, Dog Poems, and The Truck Driver Treated for Shock; three stand-alone works of fiction--Mermaid Road, Executor, and The Last Unsuitable Man; The Chronicles of Deasil Widdy trilogy--In Which (shortlisted for the 2019 QWF price for Children’s literature and the 2019 ReLit Award), Measured, and Third Circle; as well as the stand-alone prequel to the Deasil Widdy books--Rope: A Tale Told in Prose and Verse; and her Maples Mystery series--The Cat Among Us, The Cat Vanishes, The Cat Between, The Cat Possessed, A Clutter of Cats, The Cat Looked Back, The Cat Crosses a Line, and The Cat Laughs.

Her poems appear in literary magazines, chapbooks and anthologies, including The Best Canadian Poetry 2013, 2021 and 2024. She’s been shortlisted in FreeFall magazine’s annual contest three times and won a Manitoba Magazine Award. She has presented her work in many public forums in Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, Saskatoon, Kingston and New York City. Carson lives with two cats in St-Lazare, Quebec, where she writes and either shovels snow or gardens, depending on the season.