Reminiscent of Orwell’ s “ Animal Farm” and Philip K. Dick’ s “ Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep” and the movie inspired by it, “ Bladerunner,” “ Love & Murder” is, among other things, a treatise on nature of humanity (as portrayed by cats) under the stress of environmental degradation. And it derives from the life experience of a single woman, Katie Christine Bishop. Her early years were comfortably middle-class: she did well in school, went to church, played soccer. Then her mother became ill, and then permanently disabled. Her father’ s loss of his job and his career added to the family’ s burdens. Years later, traveling in France with her husband, she noticed a colony of cats harboring in a church. How many of these animals, she wondered, had once known a comfortable home, a caring family, only to lose them in a flash? She saw her book in the tradition of noir, and began to read and re-read her way through the genre, particularly the work of Dashiell Hammett. She became enthralled with the work of Akira Kurasawa and John Ford. She was entranced by unforgiving landscapes, and the idea of human beings— or cats— malformed by those landscapes. She began to write— “ Love & Murder.”