Cat Marsala is a journalist working out of Chicago. She gets into more mysteries than your average reporter. Her latest mystery is called Hard Evidence. The writer of the Cat Marsala series is Barbara D'Amato. Hard Evidence was copyrighted in 1999 and published by Scribner.
Cat and her boyfriend, Doctor Sam Davidian, are having a nice meal. That is until Cat brings out a bone that she got for her dog, Dapper. Sam looks at the bone and decides that it's human. He finds out that the bone came from Spenser and Angelotti, a food emporium that Cat just did an article on. Cat calls the cops in the form of her old friend Harold McCoo, who is the Chief of Detectives for the Chicago Police Department.
As the police and Cat begin to look into the mystery of the bone, it appears that indeed the thing is from a human. And there is a missing person from the staff of Spenser and Angelotti. The police makes the store recall all of the meat that was sold around the time that Cat got the bone. They want to make sure that what customers that was hamburger and steak wasn't actually human remains.
As some of Chicago panics ( Mad Cow Disease, anyone? ), Cat goes undercover at Spenser and Angelotti to try to find out what's really going on.
Hard Evidence goes down real good. It is a nice addition to the series that includes titles like Hard Luck, Hardball and Hard Case.
If you're not too grossed out by the theme ( ground up body parts possibly sold as meat) then Hard Evidence is a good mystery to read. It has all of the right elements of a top notch mystery.