The Cat Who Walks Through Walls

The Cat Who Walks Through Walls is Robert A. Heinlein’s 1985 late-career novel, one of the five "World as Myth" books that fold his earlier universes (Lazarus Long, the Future History, Glory Road, Stranger in a Strange Land) into a single multiverse continuity. The narrator is Richard Ames, a writer dining at the Rainbow’s End restaurant on Luna when a stranger drops dead at his table and the next several hundred pages of incident unfold. The plot moves from Luna to other timelines, Time Corps recruitment, and a third-act reunion with characters from Heinlein’s entire catalog.

Late Heinlein is divisive territory, and this book sits in the middle: it has the brisk dialogue, libertarian-domestic banter, and competent-genius protagonists his fans love, plus the digressive philosophizing his critics roll their eyes at. The plot is genuinely engineered, with at least three first-act misdirections that pay off, and the Hazel Stone subplot connects clearly to The Rolling Stones. Readers new to the World as Myth thread will find the metafictional ending dizzying but mostly satisfying.

Recommended for Heinlein readers who have finished Time Enough for Love and want the next World-as-Myth entry, and for anyone curious about books like The Cat Who Walks Through Walls in the larger "author writes themselves into the multiverse" tradition (Stephen King’s Dark Tower books are the closest contemporary cousin). A solid late-career four stars.