Feline Wizards - 1, 2

Life's already much too busy for Rhiow

and the other cats of the New York City

worldgating maintenance teams. The old,

cramped Penn Station is being torn apart

and relocated into its big new building,

which means that the Penn worldgates have had to be moved too. Everyone's

nerves are in shreds, and no one's had

enough sleep for a human, let alone a

Person. So when Rhiow goes staggering

home to her litterbox the morning after

the job's done and finds it already occupied by another cat -- who then

vanishes -- at first she thinks she's

hallucinating.

But she's not. When her team is called to

Los Angeles to do a minor consult after

the city's single worldgate is deranged by a string of earthquakes, Rhiow's

"hallucination" reappears bearing a dire

message from the past. The messenger, a

tom called Hwaith, reveals that similar

earthquakes are striking Los Angeles in

1946 -- indicators not only of increasing instability in the San Andreas Fault, but

of something far more troubling.

Something is trying to subvert the Los

Angeles gate to its own purposes. "The

Lone Power?" Rhiow asks. "No," Hwaith

says. "Something worse. Something from outside."

Rhiow and her team find themselves

caught up in ever-deepening peril and

mystery as they make the dangerous trip

back to post-war Los Angeles. Their

intervention plunges them headfirst into the glitzy, murky world of 1946

Hollywood, a smoggy film-noir landscape

filled with glamourous starlets,

flamboyantly corrupt studio heads,

wicked, pampered cats with hidden

agendas, unsolved murders, snoopy screenwriters, scheming PR flacks, and a

shadowy, celebrity-ridden cult dabbling

in knowledge better left alone --

knowledge which could destroy their

world's present and doom its future, if

the dreadful promise of the Year of the Black Jaguar is fulfilled...