Good morning! I’m Colbie Summers, owner of Meowio Batali Gourmet Cat Food. I just spent two hours cooking my Chicken and Sage Sauté for my cat customers. I like to get it done and air out the kitchen before my father and son wake up, because they both object to the smell.

Trouble, however, loves it. She’s my cat and the inspiration for Meowio. Back when I was a property manager, I found her abandoned in an empty apartment. I soon learned the hard way that she couldn’t digest regular cat food, so I started cooking for her. It didn’t take long for my friends to request the same food for their cats. I began selling to an ever widening group of cat owners who found their cats were healthier when they ate organic, human grade food.

Trouble is also my taste tester. If she likes a new recipe, it sells. If she hates it, it doesn’t sell. I no longer make the mistake of trying to force a new product. It saves me a lot of time, money and effort.

My twelve year old son Elliott and I recently moved in with my dad. He’s recovering from his second bout of pneumonia and I was about to be replaced by a service, part of a cost-saving plan by the building owner.

Perhaps it was fate for us to move from downtown San Diego, California to Sunnyside, a small town twenty miles east. There’s a lot to get used to, including Charlie, a Buff Laced Polish chicken with an elaborate feathery comb. (Google them – they’re adorable!) Charlie was once used for experiments and loves to press anything that looks like a button, especially our doorbell.

So I just have to return him to his farm at the end of the street and talk to Joss Delaney, reclusive organic chicken farmer and neighborhood hottie.

I was invited to join the Sunnyside Power Moms, a group of women who run businesses out of their homes and meet regularly for support and networking. I never thought of myself as a soccer mom, but I’m fitting right in out here in Sunnyside.

That is, until I discover a dead body.

You can read more about Colbie in The Trouble With Murder, the first book in the NEW “Gourmet Cat” mystery series.

Single mom and gourmet cat food entrepreneur Colbie Summers thought she’d escaped her tiny California hometown forever. But when her father needs her, she packs up her adolescent son, their finicky feline, Trouble, and her budding business. She knows change is tough—but she doesn’t expect it to be murder . . .

Between dealing with her newly rural life, her grumpy, sports-obsessed father, and preparing to showcase her products in the local Sunnyside Power Mom’s trade show, Colbie has more on her plate than she bargained for. Luckily, she has her official taste-tester, Trouble, by her side to vet her Meowio Batali Gourmet Cat Food line. Things look promising—until one of the Power Moms is found dead—with an engraved Meowio specialty knife buried in her chest.

As the prime suspect, Colbie needs paws on the ground to smoke out who had means, motive, and opportunity among the networking mothers—including a husband-stealing Sofia Vergara lookalike. And the cat’s still not out of the bag when a second violent death rocks the bucolic community. Trouble may have nine lives, but Colbie’s only got one to clear her name and stop a killer from pulling off the purr-fect crime . . .

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About the author
Kathy Krevat is the author of the “Gourmet Cat Mystery” series and the nationally bestselling “Chocolate Covered Mystery” series under the name Kathy Aarons.

She lives in San Diego with her husband of twenty-five years, close to the beach, their two grown daughters and Philz coffee. Kathy’s an avid supporter of youth arts education and also serves as president of the San Diego chapter of Sisters in Crime.

Follow Kathy on Facebook, Twitter, or at www.kathykrevat.com.

All comments are welcomed.