JANET EVANOVICH calls Midnight Louie the funniest, hairiest, hard-boiled PI on the planet and readers are biting their nails as Carole Nelson Douglas’s popular alphabetic Midnight Louie feline PI mystery series nears its end with the 27th and penultimate entry, Cat in a Zebra Zoot Suit

In Cat in a Zebra Zoot Suit, Louie’s roommate, petite powerhouse PR freelancer Temple Barr, discovers a strip club opening in a nearby empty building threatens her elderly landlady’s wedding chapel business. Electra’s Lark’s troubles go supernova with a murder charge for a death that echoes a bizarre slaying decades earlier. Temple and Louie must solve why a forgotten fifties night club has become a now a nexus of death and greed. Meanwhile Temple’s fiance, Matt Devine, ex-priest radio shrink, plays detective with a rough crowd getting rougher, her ex, magician-counterterrorist Max Kinsella, dodges IRA remnants in Ireland, where psychotic liar Kathleen O'Connor leads him to his cousin, presumed dead from a pub bombing years earlier. All the investigators’ pasts draw them into shocking revelations and present peril.

Readers have fretted on online sites for years about the Z book ending Louie’s adventures. Not so. A final entry will follow the Z book: Cat in an Alphabet Endgame, coming in 2016. Even then, Vegas’ hairiest sleuth (whose feline-noir voice has been compared to Hammett, Hammer, and Nathan Detroit) will not be hanging up his fedora.

So in this typically fun-filled, witty and comic Midnight Louie outing, Douglas tackles a multitude of serious and topical issues. –M0STLY MURDER on Cat in a Flamingo Fedora