In a dark, seedy world full of bad cats, a lone detective is puzzled by a city-spanning crime that has him licked.

Nub City is in the grip of a Depression, and its cat inhabitants are getting desperate. They'll resort to thievery, deception, and even murder to fill their furry bellies. It doesn't help that mice are an untouchable, endangered species, and the cats have to get their favorite food from illegal squeakeasies.

Only a few good cats keep the streets safe. One of those cats is Tiger Straight, private detective, who braves the city's underbelly to solve crimes with a sour-milk wit.

Tiger is hired by dangerous dame Connie Hant, who's lost her brothers through mysterious circumstances. With the help of his assistant Bug, Tiger prowls the mean streets of Nub, sniffing for clues and getting up to his whiskers in trouble.

As more murders occur and the mystery deepens, Tiger finds more than he bargained for-including a dizzy witness, an attempt by the bad guys to bury him in kitty litter, and a romance with a beautiful make-up artist. And what does Little Tim, a refuse-collecting cat, have to do with it all? Tiger is determined to find out in this epic detective thriller.

From the pages of the bestselling novel Milk Treading, The Cat Who Stole the Cream brings feline scribe Julius Kyle's hairball-spitting hero, Tiger Straight, vividly to life.