There seems to be a pretty flourishing sub-genre of cat mystery solvers actually filed in the mystery section of chain bookstores.
I did read one involving foxes, and it was both pretty serious and very American; it involved a fox-hunting club in Virginia (the American part, so I'm pretty sure it wasn't translated) and hard drug use, infidelity, racial and class tensions, just a lot of "not cute comedy" stuff. I believe the author was prolific cat detective author who decided a fox/foxhound team-up would be interesting; the murder could even be considered a double murder, since a fox was killed in the set-up. In fact, as the human victim was very unsympathetic and the murderer had sympathetic motives, the fox death is actually what gets punished; the fox-hunting club only chased foxes, and killing them was thought of as a crime, as the human detective makes clear she's only turning the perpetrator in because she killed the fox.
It was a few years back, and I think the novel got a sequel, but I can't even remember the name of the one I read; it wasn't very good as a detective/crime novel, and I didn't like the human "detective" stand-in, so that was my one foray into the genre. Will note in this novel, animals could talk to each other, but not humans.
There seems to be a pretty flourishing sub-genre of cat mystery solvers actually filed in the mystery section of chain bookstores.
I did read one involving foxes, and it was both pretty serious and very American; it involved a fox-hunting club in Virginia (the American part, so I'm pretty sure it wasn't translated) and hard drug use, infidelity, racial and class tensions, just a lot of "not cute comedy" stuff. I believe the author was prolific cat detective author who decided a fox/foxhound team-up would be interesting; the murder could even be considered a double murder, since a fox was killed in the set-up. In fact, as the human victim was very unsympathetic and the murderer had sympathetic motives, the fox death is actually what gets punished; the fox-hunting club only chased foxes, and killing them was thought of as a crime, as the human detective makes clear she's only turning the perpetrator in because she killed the fox.
It was a few years back, and I think the novel got a sequel, but I can't even remember the name of the one I read; it wasn't very good as a detective/crime novel, and I didn't like the human "detective" stand-in, so that was my one foray into the genre. Will note in this novel, animals could talk to each other, but not humans.