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Gary Pemberton is Fine: Book One of the Ninth Life Series
Paperback
Series: The Ninth Life, Book 1
ISBN13: 9781966703464
Publisher: Humbolton Press
Published: Jul 6 2026
Pages: 272
Weight: 0.54
Height: 0.68 Width: 5.00 Depth: 8.00
Language: English
He washed up on a Maine beach in a stolen tuxedo, holding a calico cat in a Hello Kitty carrier and $143,400 in cash. He could not remember his own name.
So he picked one off a cereal box.
Gary Pemberton bought a shuttered bait shop in Goose Harbor, filled it with rescue cats, learned to pull a decent espresso, and set about the quiet business of disappearing. The town took him in the way small Maine towns do - with casseroles, opinions, and Edna Kowalski pronouncing his coffee adequate, which, from Edna, is a standing ovation. For a while, it works.
But Gary's hands know things his head doesn't. They know sightlines and exits. They can pin-bone a fish in eleven seconds and put a menacing stranger on the floor with a sugar packet. And a year is a long time to stay hidden.
When a bishop chess piece slides under the door at three in the morning, a man in chinos orders a flat white, and a woman with a leather jacket and a missing kidney rents the apartment above the bookstore, the people who lost Gary Pemberton have finally come to collect. The problem is, the town that took him in has no intention of handing him back - and neither do the cats.
Gary Pemberton Is Fine is the first novel in The Ninth Life series: a cozy thriller about an amnesiac operative, a Maine cat cafe, and the small town that accidentally becomes his counterintelligence network. Funny, warm, and patient as a sleeping cat with one eye open.
Perfect for readers who love:
- The dry wit of Mick Herron's Slow Horses
- The found-family warmth of Fredrik Backman and Richard Osman's The Thursday Murder Club
- A retired operative who just wants to be left alone (John Wick, Nobody)
- Cozy mysteries where the cats have opinions and the seventy-eight-year-old widow keeps her late husband's rifle oiled
Grab Book One and meet the quietest dangerous man in Maine - before his past finds the door he just locked.
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