Liquid Silver Books, $4.75, ISBN 978-1-59578-507-7
Fantasy Romance, 2009

“We’ve decided both of you should leave. Now,” the center woman spoke. The sound of her voice suggested it had already been accomplished.

“And your reason is…?” Sable glanced over her nails, wondering how long she should toy with them, mice to the slaughter.

“You quite obviously don’t belong here.” A cobra couldn’t have been more venomous, had it spoken.

“And why is that?” Sable silkily drawled. “Ms. Snooty Tight-ass.” Looking up, she glared. “By the way, the shrimp you just ate isn’t digesting properly, and you stink.”

Their arms still arrogantly akimbo, all three women pointedly stared up and down the length of Sable and Yisbet’s human-form bodies – not realizing that their cat ears were real. “No one we know would dare show up… so utterly, disgustingly fat.”

Once I have stopped laughing, I have to confess that I don’t know what to make of Black Cat Beauty.

I mean, this is, in a way, a fun and entertaining romp. We have our over-the-top heroine Sable Kiki, who pretty much sashays her way through the story with her shapeshifting cat ways. Her undercover assignment, if you can call it that, is to infiltrate a house party and check out the true motives of one Devon Zant, a beefcake actor whose superhero movies are the latest “in” things in Hollywood at the moment. What she doesn’t know at first is that Devon, like her, isn’t entirely human. He is actually an alien from a distant planet currently on Earth to settle a score with his enemy.

Unfortunately, the story is full of cheesy and often cringe-inducingly corny turn of phrases (most of them involving the word “pussy”) and conversations that I find it hard to enjoy the story without groaning in dismay. It’s a matter of taste level, a subjective one, of course, and in this instance I find the author’s attempts to be cheeky a little too much on the juvenile side for me. “Ms Snooty Tight-ass”? What are we, thirteen year old girls fighting over an autographed photo of the Jonas Brothers?

I could adore Black Cat Beauty, but I can’t look beyond the unbearable cheesiness of the language employed by the author in this one.