Sheila Webster Boneham

Animal photographer Janet McPhail, her Australian shepherd dog, Jay, and her cat, Leo, are back, along with her human friends and acquaintances, including Goldie, Tom, and the easily agitated but surprisingly sound Alberta. Leo has just begun competing in cat agility, while Alberta is working, against considerable opposition, to establish a managed feral cat colony--with all the cats neutered and vaccinated, and shelter and food provided. (The effect of this would be to both gradually reduce the number of feral cats, and to reduce their hunting. But don't tell the cat haters that; they won't listen.) Even worse, one of Alberta's neighbors wants to develop the adjoining wetlands, doing far more damage to the local wildlife than a cat colony, managed or not, ever could.

Meanwhile, Janet's mother, now in a nursing home, has met someone, a sweet, kind man of her own generation. His son-in-law (the developer) discovers the relationship, expresses outrage, and decides to move him.

This is all distressing enough, but it gets worse when the developer turns up dead in the agility tunnel at a competition.

The problem is not a lack of suspects; it's a surfeit of them. I've barely scratched the surface of the list of local people who hated this guy, and with good reason. Janet has a lot of friends and acquaintances, she's intelligent, observant, and has a photographer's eye for detail. She pays attention to the behavior, and the messages, of her animals and others'.

I like Janet, I like her animals and her friends, and her family is growing on me. I like this story. It moves, it's nicely complex, and people don't do stupid things because the plot requires it.

Except Janet, in her personal life. Specifically, her romantic life.

Despite that particular frustration, I really enjoyed this book, and look forward to more from Boneham.

I bought this book.… (mer)

Janet McPhail, photographer and serious dog enthusiast, is back, along with her Australian shepherd Jay, her ex-flower child friend Goldie, and hunky botanist and Labrador retriever owner Tom, as well as the rest of the Fort Wayne dog sports community.

Janet, Tom, and their dogs are out at a privately owned parkland popular for training and exercising retrievers when Tom's Lab, Drake, abruptly abandons the exercise, leaps into the river, and returns from a small island with a blood-soaked canvass bag. Inside the bag is a torn $100 bill, and one red feather, which certainly isn't from any local birds.

This is of course just the tip of the iceberg, and a wild few days including a peculiar local cult, exotic birds, a child (not a dog!) with an excellent set of teeth, a high school crush of Janet's, and Tom's potentially alarming announcement that he and Drake want to "expand their family."

Things start to get scary when a photography student of Janet's suddenly turns up dead shortly after leaving a message asking to meet to discuss something odd he's seen out at that same park.

This is a good, solid mystery, with adequate clues as well as good red herrings, and Janet and friends, including the four-legged ones, are developing nicely as characters.

Recommended.

I received a free electronic galley of this book from the publisher via NetGalley.
… (mer)

This is a really fun mystery, set in the AKC dog world--in this case, the dog obedience circuit.It captures in a fun way both the nutty obsessiveness and the genuine love of animals that so often characterize the competitive dog world.

Janet McPhail is a professional photographer who competes, for fun, in dog obedience with her Aussie (Australian shepherd), Jay. On one fine, sunny morning, they're at a competition, and a far more serious competitor, Abigail Dorn, falls to the ground, in obvious distress--and dies in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. As one of the first to Abigail's side, along with her husband Greg Dorn, and the person who takes home her dog, Pip, and cleans up the food at the Dorns' crate set-up, Janet becomes at least officially a "person of interest" for the police, when they determine that Abigail was poisoned.

Of course Janet can't keep from poking around, talking to people, asking questions. There are a lot of potential suspects, because Abigail Dorn had a rather abrasive manner and didn't suffer fools gladly, but the more she learns about her, the more Janet regrets that she didn't know the woman better. As she learns about natural plant poisons from her eccentric neighbor, Goldie Sunshine, gets to know major hunk Tom Saunders--who turns out to be Abigail's cousin and a possible suspect, and wonders over the unpredictably prickly behavior of her friend Connie, all while trying to move her increasingly senile mother into a nursing home, Janet gets more and more alarmed. When the Dorns' dogs disappear and Jay is threatened, she's terrified--and still not ready to back off.

This is a nicely done mystery, with very real dogs and dog people, and I'm looking forward to more.

Becki's Rule Note: No animals die in the course of this book.

Recommended.… (mer)