The cat who sang for the birds

Summary: Spring has come early to Moose County; the flowers are blooming and the birds are singing. But all is not well four hundred miles north of everywhere. In an effort to be in swing with the season, newspaper columnist and millionaire philanthropist Jim Qwilleran has had the apple barn he calls home remodeled, and even added a gazebo. But instead of the gentle communion with nature he had hoped to share with his two Siamese, Koko and Yum Yum, Qwill is awakened each morning to a chorus of trills, chirrups, whistles, warbles, and twitters that has the cats screeching to in join the action. To top it all off, Koko might be trying to tell him something about how all of the recent trouble in Moose County is connected...but what could it be? It all began when someone spray-painted WICTH on the side of Widow Coggin's barn on Trevelyan Road. The someone stole some sketches of nudes from Pickax's new Art Center across the way. A few scattered drops of blood on the floor near the cage of a resident parrot-a parrot who happens to have a penchant for talking dirty-indicate that the thief did not escape without a mark. When a fire erupts on the Coggin farm, taking the life of Widow Coggin, Qwilleran is determined to discover who might have liked to see the eccentric old woman removed from the land, could be responsible. Throw in the disappearance of a young artist, evidence that some of the leading families of Pickax are descended from bootleggers, and an anti-computer uprising at the town library, and springtime in Pickax turns out to be anything but peaceful. --[Book Jacket].