Do you like dogs as well as mysteries? Authors Susan Conant, Carol Lea Benjamin, and Laurien Berenson, to name just three, have great mystery series for the dog lover.
Susan Conant's Holly Winter series was my entry into the world of dog mysteries. Holly is a 30-something columnist for
Dog's Life magazine. She is the owner/trainer of two Alaskan malamutes - Rowdy and Kimi. She lives in Cambridge, MA. Her significant other, Steve Delaney, is a veterinarian. Other characters that pop in and out of this series are her father, Buck, a larger-than-life former golden retriever breeder; her upstairs tenant, Rita, a psycho-therapist, and Kevin, her next door neighbor and a member of the Cambridge police force. The series starts with
A New Leash on Death. A training session ends with the discovery of the body of one of the participants, strangled with his dog's leash. My favorite is
Animal Appetite, the 10th book in the series. Her friend, Rita, challenges Holly to write about human behavior rather than dog behavior for a change. Holly tackles the tale of Hannah Duston, who was captured by Indians in 1697, escaped, and lived to tell the tale. She also gets involved with an 18-year-old mystery. Publisher Jack Andrews killed himself with poison in his coffee, leaving two suicide notes and his golden retriever chained to the desk. His family claims his business partner murdered him. Holly can't believe that he would chain up his dog. The latest book in the series is
Creature Discomforts, in which Holly has amnesia from a fall and can't remember anything, not even her dogs. The book follows Holly as she tries to piece together her memories, both distant and recent.
Carol Lea Benjamin is the author of the Rachel Alexander and Dash series. Rachel is a private investigator, well, OK, technically a research assistant because she never bothered to get her PI license. Dash, short for Dashielle, is her partner and her pit bull. Their home turf is New York City. The first book is This Dog For Hire, in which a New York artist has been murdered. The only witness to the crime is his missing dog, a champion basenji named Magritte. Rachel and Dash find the dog, only to become targets of the killer themselves. The Dog Who Knew Too Much, the next book, deals with the apparent suicide of a tai chi instructor. Rachel literally assumes the dead girl's life as a way to get into her mind prior to the suicide. A very eerie and compelling book. In the third book, A Hell of a Dog, Rachel and Dash are hired as undercover security at a dog-training conference. Her fourth book, Lady Vanishes deals with a home for the autistic disabled with Dash in his role as a therapy dog while the latest book, Wrong Dog, investigates a mysterious organization that clones the faithful companion of an epileptic teacher at a school for deaf children.
