Rich's Gulag

This was a seriously unsatisfying end to what was a very charming and occasionally enthralling sleuth series. It was like the dregs or basic ideas of about six books were thrown together to make one very poor novel, not even following the general formula that was a staple for the Qwilleran books. I had first thought I had missed a volume, as a major-minor character was mentioned as having died (No spoiler here: He was a hundred years old and a good friend of main character Jim Qwilleran). Many other plot points are introduced and abandoned, loose threads that weren't all that loose are tied up in different ways, and the entire story is just a letdown from start-to-finish. It's probably good that the 30th book (the final one written before Lilian Jackson Braun's death) was canceled - the last four or five books in the series were skating on the edge of being pedantic. But most of them at least made a modicum of sense - The Cat Who Had 60 Whiskers (a fact established about 8 books previously) is just a badly-written, poorly-plotted travesty that does nothing to give readers closure to some beloved characters.