Lika Swan finally has her own detective agency, a crumbling mansion, a devoted butler, and fewer than a hundred gold pieces to her name. Naturally, her most pressing problem is how to afford a blue steam-cabriolet.

The obvious solution is to sell something. Unfortunately, Lika's most valuable assets are a stash of contraband Scotch, a suspiciously powerful magic scroll borrowed from a police archive without anything resembling official permission, and a bronze cat figurine she flatly refuses to part with.

Then Baroness Silvia Cat walks into the Red Cat Detective Agency, recognizes the figurine, and turns Lika's money troubles into something much bigger.

Scrapper, the infuriating ginger cat Lika thought she knew, has secrets of his own — and so does his family. Soon Lika is tangled up in werecats, aristocratic intrigue, inconvenient marriage proposals, royal expeditions, missing relatives, old prophecies, and people with very different ideas about who owns what. A journey toward the Misty Mountains only makes things worse: on Edem, the farther you travel from civilization, the stranger civilization becomes.

Fortunately, Lika has never believed a detective needs to follow the rules. She has Yoko, a three-tailed kitsune with an agenda of her own; Den, whose idea of a proper butler owes far too much to Sherlock Holmes; a detective agency with a growing reputation for chaos; and more than enough confidence to land herself in situations that common sense would have avoided entirely.

But this time the case is personal. And before it's over, Lika will have to discover what it truly means to be a werecat — and whether the losers everyone underestimates might be far more dangerous than they look.

Book Two of the Detective Agency "Red Cat" series: a fast-paced, humorous fantasy mystery packed with shapeshifters, magical intrigue, eccentric aristocrats, disastrous plans, and a heroine who still prefers solving problems her own way.