Kidnap at the Catfish Cafe

Author Study Selection

Author:  Patricia Reilly Giff, 1998, Viking

Illustrator:  Lynne Cravath

This is the third and final choice for my author study, and I found it quite different from the previous Giff books.  Kidnap at the Catfish Cafe is a juvenile detective book, and it takes the reader on a hunt to find a purse snatcher.  The detective is a teenage girl who lives in Florida, I believe.  She takes a cat, who is thought to be a stray but turns out as someone's missing pet, as her co-detective.  This cat takes on human qualities and is described as nodding and making other gestures that would make one believe it is speaking to Minnie, the main character.  Minnie ends up solving the case, as I would have expected, and she becomes friends with another amateur detective named Cash. 

The entire plot is exactly what I expected from the beginning.  It is one installment in a series called The Adventures of Minnie and Max.  The characters follow the typical route to solving a mystery.  By that, I am referring to some classic mysteries such as Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys.  Each book was a carbon copy of the other, just with different twists, turns, and characters.  This makes it easy for readers to fall in love with the books, but it also makes it easy for them to predict what will happen.  While I have not read other Minnie and Max books, I would suspect that they do the same.  I liked this book, but as I said earlier, it was unlike the other books I have read by Patricia Reilly Giff.  Her recent juvenile chapter books are more historical in nature, and they are more believable.  This book was dull, uninteresting, and very predictable.