Murder at the Black Cat Café by Seishi Yokomizo, translated by Bryan Karetnyk
Though this is part of the Detective Kosuke Kindaichi stories, it’s also a stand-alone mystery, full of jealousy and betrayal. It has animal death, so heads up on that.
In a Tokyo still recovering from the war, a policeman finds two bodies—a woman’s and a black cat’s—in a sloppily dug hole near The Black Cat Café. The woman’s face is so disfigured as to make her unrecognizable, and the cat is not the one that belongs to the café, so its presence only adds to the mystery. The scruffy Detective Kosuke Kindaichi is put on the case, and it isn’t long before he finds out about the café’s mistress, Oshima, and her super-secret past. What is she hiding? And what is her relationship with the owner?