The ever-acerbic and seriously funny Amicus Curious, Q.C., is on the prowl for justice and the rule of law in this imaginative feline mystery. One cold winter morning, on the front lawn of the Law Society. Justice Ted Mariner sees an alley cat kill a bird. The angry judge remands the "murderer" into the custody of the Society's librarians, who provide the cat with bread and water and a Humpty Dumpty potato chip box for his bed. As their new colleague is a friend of the court, the librarians dub him Amicus Q.C. (for Questing Cat). They soon find him in the journals room, sniffing around the reasonably fresh corpse of Jeremiah "The Splinter" Debeers, anti-establishment lawyer, holy-roller, and general pain in the backside for his fellow benchers, the wealthy old-boy governors at the Law Society. Debeers had several enemies, but was his death just a freak photocopying accident? What exactly are the confidential records from the Society's wine cellar doing on the copier near his corpse? With all these deadly distractions around his office, on top of his agonizing war of attrition with the squirrels in the Law Society's garden, will Justice Mariner find time to complete his seminar paper on the constitutional rights of tree-huggers? Ever at risk that the testy "ancient Mariner" will change his mind and sentence him to the humane society shelter, cat teams up with human to find the answers.

Jeffrey Miller is the senior feature columnist for The Lawyers Weekly, a legal correspondent in radio and TV, and diligently avoids working as a litigation lawyer.