A Review of Delas Heras's "The Nine Lives of Bianca Moon" (audiobook)

Delas Heras’s “The Nine Lives of Bianca Moon” is a book perfect for any fan of hard-boiled detective novels, but who wishes those novels were populated by cats and dogs instead of gumshoes and dames. Also, the book possesses a light-hearted paranormal element that adds a new twist to the genre. 

Junior Detective Morton Digby, a border collie, and his partner, a Scottish terrier, are trying to solve the murder of one journalist, Flint Lockford: an Irish Wolfhound. Bianca Moon, Flint’s cat girlfriend, is also trying to track down the killer. Cats have nine lives in this story, getting resurrected wherever they were born each time they are killed. Bianca’s investigation doesn’t go so well, and there’s a question whether she’ll get out of it alive. On the other side of the veil, recently deceased Flint Lockford is trying to adjust to life after death while finding his killer and protecting his girlfriend. I mean, “fiancée.” 

This was a fun, quick listen. It follows almost all the tropes you would expect from a detective novel, but the addition of the paranormal elements was entertaining. There is a lot of stereotyping of breeds: hounds make the best cops, terriers are tenacious, bulldogs drool... The author offers us a nice selection of red herrings, and the supporting characters all serve their function. 

The narrator, Price Waldman, did a good job portraying all the different characters, though I didn’t take to a couple of the female voices. They felt a bit too trite. 

This was a fun read and, being the first in the series promises to be followed by some more creative content. Being the owner of both a border collie and an Irish wolfhound, I enjoyed the fact that they were the main characters. I would definitely check out the sequel if I wanted something that promised to satisfy and didn’t take too much heavy literary lifting. I received this book from NetGalley.