Captain Dumb🍑 and the Dead Man’s 🦆

Pickles the dachshund has lost his prized pirate duck. By the following night, the toy has resurfaced on North Jetty beside the body of waterfront consultant Lionel Spratt—and Captain Dumb🍑 is sitting next to the dead man with one paw on the evidence.

The photograph is all Mackerel Point needs. Half the town thinks its unofficial harbor cat caught a killer. The other half thinks he is one.

Jude Tuck would prefer not to interpret the behavior of a cat who has never requested representation. She spent twenty-eight years as a court reporter, however, and she knows exactly how much damage a confident story can do when nobody stops to check the record. With Detective Maureen Pike handling the official investigation, Jude begins tracing the ordinary facts beneath the town’s increasingly extraordinary theories.

The trail leads through a disputed waterfront development, a museum collection with a missing letter, an altered rubber duck, and a conservation deed that may have been protecting more than public access. Captain Dumb🍑 keeps behaving like a perfectly normal cat. Unfortunately for the humans around him, normal cat behavior has a way of disturbing the evidence they hoped would stay buried.

Captain Dumb🍑 and the Dead Man’s 🦆 is a funny, fair-play coastal cozy mystery featuring an exacting former court reporter, a competent detective, a Florida town that treats civic embarrassment as a public resource, and one calico cat who refuses to explain himself.

The murder is solved in this book. A larger mystery surrounding the Captain begins here and continues through the series.