Captain Dumb🍑 and the House That Went to the 🐈

Mavis Noll has left behind a narrow coastal house, a collection of navigation-lamp records, several mutually suspicious relatives, and a trust written for the benefit of one particular calico. Jude Tuck would prefer not to become the temporary human responsible for interpreting any of it. Captain Dumb🍑, as usual, has declined to state a position.

Before the legal dust can settle, appraiser Perry Cask is found dead on Saltmarsh House’s screened porch beside a shattered hurricane lamp. His camera is missing. So is an old survey cloth that may explain why the property’s western edge no longer agrees with the official record.

The discrepancy is small on paper and enormously valuable in practice. A marina sale depends on the disputed frontage. Mavis’s family wants her belongings returned. A preservation expert wants the house protected. A contractor has reasons to keep her invoices out of the light. Meanwhile, the mayor would very much like to convert a private trust problem into a public attraction featuring the least cooperative animal in Mackerel Point.

With Detective Maureen Pike leading the homicide investigation, Jude takes on the narrower job of protecting the house, the records, and the limits everyone keeps trying to cross. The trail runs through missing photographs, altered hardware, a false boundary marker, and a genuine iron pin hidden beneath mangrove roots. Every object seems ready to prove whatever its current holder needs—until Jude starts asking who possessed it, when it moved, and what its history can actually support.

Captain Dumb🍑 and the House That Went to the 🐈 is a funny, fair-play coastal cozy mystery about inheritance, evidence, municipal ambition, and an ordinary cat who refuses to become anyone’s legal argument.

The murder is solved in this book. The larger Captain File mystery continues with a second fragment from the past.