The animal-lover's book of beastly murder Book

Patricia Highsmith brings together in one collection thirteen tales of revenge, animal style.

This is a mixed bag of quality and entertainment that ranges from the brilliant to the mediocre, the witty to the dull and the obvious to the horrific. Stories about how humans mistreat animals and the understandable mixture of reactions from the animals; fear, instinct, self-defence, murder and straight forward standing up for their rights to be treated with dignity. We're not just talking about cats and dogs but camels and elephants too. Highsmith takes an animals perspective on everyday behaviour from the human beings who dominate them and largely achieves great things.

The stories can lazily be divided in to two categories, those from the animal point of view and those from the human but both ways she paints the human in a negative light. The most enjoyable of the stories are those that fall in to the first category however; the performing elephant who is mistreated one time too many, the goat with too much energy for its owners, the cat who is in love with its owner, the dog whose owner dies for example and that's ignoring stand out high point of the tale of the rat in Venice and the confessions of a New York cockroach who's going up in the world.

It's the other group that I had problems with, Highsmith doesn't reach the same heights when she describes events from the human observers point of view; in these the people are much more obviously horrible and the behaviour of the animals so much more obvious and bloody, essentially meaning if you've read one of them you've read all of them. Not an ideal characteristic for a short story collection and hence the award of only 3 stars.

If you're already a fan then this is a must-read, if you're new to this wonderful writer of literary suspense thrillers (amongst other things) then perhaps start with one of her more popular novels before diving in to this one.