One of Toronto’s most prominent television anchors makes his first foray into fiction with this novel about a city ignited by a $2-million reward for a lost cat. When Julia discovers that her cat Jones is missing, her meat-packing magnate husband, François Will, uses the outrageous reward as a marketing scheme to get his face on television. A rising media star, Ivan Teuti, covers the story as the inhabitants of the city (unnamed but obviously Toronto) transform into a violent, chaotic search party.

Conceived as a modern urban satire on overwrought media, endless construction, and overpopulation, Cat’s Crossing contains too many unbelievable details, both small and large, to be ignored: a woman is suddenly fired from her job of choosing poetry for subway ads simply because her boss decides he hates poetry; sewage breaks into the city’s main water supply because of a single distracted worker; and when a news anchor rashly decides not to cover the cat story, his assistant, despite his freakish appearance, is asked to step in.

The novel’s faults are inadvertently articulated by Cameron in his description of Julia from the perspective of her husband: “Her moods were a shifting problem he couldn’t figure out, a messy, fluid puzzle with no consistency or direction and probably no solution at all.” The characters’ motivations and personalities oscillate drastically, and thoughts and actions are left unexplained – one moment they are compassionate, the next indifferent, murderous, or suicidal. Similarly, animals, on occasion, display anthropomorphic behaviour for no other reason than to move the plot along.

The problem is not the use of hyperbole or humour (this is a satire, after all), but rather that these imaginative exaggerations are not fully realized or connected into a coherent critique of society. Cameron, perhaps as a result of his long tenure as a journalist, is at his best in his eviscerating descriptions of violence, cold-heartedness, car accidents, sewage floods, and spilling blood.