Lee Fontana Books in Order

The Lee Fontana books are very different from the Joe Grey mysteries, though cat lovers will still feel at home. This two-book series, written with Pat J. J. Murphy, is a supernatural crime story with a strong mid-century American feel. The roads are dusty, the prisons are hard, the sins are old, and the devil is not a symbol. He is an active, meddling force with time on his hands.

Lee Fontana is the human center of the story, an aging thief and ex-con whose life has been tangled up with Satan since long before he understood why. The grudge goes back to an older family bargain, and by the time The Cat, the Devil, and Lee Fontana begins, Lee is being tempted toward one more dangerous job just as he is about to step back into the world. What keeps the story from sinking into gloom is Misto, the prison cat, who continues after death as a ghostly guardian with more freedom, and more reach, than most humans around him.

Misto is the spark.

He gives the books humor, speed, and an outsider's view of human weakness. He can slip where people cannot, listen where they are not wanted, and push at the edges of fate in ways that make the supernatural side of the story feel lively instead of solemn. But the human stakes stay real. Lee is tired, clever, morally mixed, and still capable of loyalty, which makes him a good fit for a series built on second chances.

The second book, The Cat, the Devil, the Last Escape, broadens the focus. A man named Morgan Blake is sent to prison for a crime he did not commit, his family is left shattered, and Lee becomes part of the effort to put things right. That book leans harder into escape plotting, family devotion, and the question of whether anyone can outmaneuver evil forever.

Setting matters a lot here. These novels carry the feel of old rail lines, desert spaces, prison yards, and postwar American lives marked by hard luck and improvisation. They are less cozy than Murphy's cat mysteries and less purely fantastical than her secondary-world books. Instead they sit in a nice in-between place, part caper, part ghost story, part moral showdown.

What holds the duology together is the idea that a person can be flawed without being lost. Lee is no saint, Morgan is under crushing pressure, and the devil keeps exploiting every weakness he can find. But Misto keeps insisting that courage, friendship, and stubborn decency still count. That makes these books feel adventurous, strange, and unexpectedly warm, even when the stakes reach past prison walls and into the afterlife.