A lawyer by day-and then only when he’s forced to take on new cases-Andy Carpenter’s true passion is the Tara Foundation, the dog rescue organization he runs with his friend Willie Miller. So it’s frightening when Willie calls him to say the alarm has gone off at the foundation building, and there’s clearly been a break-in. It turns out that a recently rescued dog, nicknamed Cheyenne since her … arrival at the foundation, has been stolen. Andy and Willie track the missing dog to a house in downtown Paterson, New Jersey and sure enough, they find the dog…standing right next to a dead body. The man had been gruesomely murdered mere minutes before Andy and Willie arrived. Could it be a coincidence? Or could the dog theft somehow be connected to the killing?
Andy takes Cheyenne safely back to the foundation building, and that should be the end of his involvement, but Andy’s curiosity-and his desire to keep the dog from further harm-won’t let him stop there. The cops have just arrested a man named Tommy Infante for the murder, but as Andy looks into the circumstances surrounding the break-in and the dog theft, he starts to wonder if Infante might actually be innocent. And when Andy takes Infante on as a client and starts searching in earnest for evidence that will exonerate him, what Andy starts to discover terrifies him. The murder might be just one small cog in a plot with far-reaching implications, and unless Andy can uncover the truth in time, thousands of lives could be in imminent danger.
Once again David Rosenfelt has written a fast-paced and clever mystery with his characteristic blend of humor, larger-than-life characters, and propulsive plotting.
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I love the entire Andy Carpenter series! Andy is smart, funny and a great lawyer even though he doesn’t like practicing. All the characters are well-developed and realistic. If you like mysteries and dogs, you won’t be disappointed!
family-dynamics, friendship, situational-humor, verbal-humor, snark-fest, gangsters, law-enforcement, private-investigators, lawyers, dogs, murder, murder-investigation
Take a wisemouthed lawyer who can afford to take semi retirement by only representing innocent clients while supporting an animal shelter, add in that his wife is no longer law enforcement but works as his private investigator and more and you have the baseline for this convoluted mystery. There are many other people who help Andy find out what the truth really is and make it courtroom admissible. Well-crafted murder mystery!
Lots of twists and turns in the plot and the characters certainly are, but there’s no need for spoilers or an attempt at a summary. I found it to be a real brain grabber and was surprised to find that it is the most recent in a series! At no time does the reader feel lost or as if missing background info.
Grover Gardner narrates this complicated snarkfest very well!
I always enjoy David Rosenfelt’s books. There’s just something about all the familiar characters that I like. Andy makes me laugh, whether he’s talking about Marcus or Willie or the prosecutor or whoever. He’s now got a grounded home life in this book and still has his rescue foundation. There are crimes, an investigation, and a trial. And there are always dogs.
I randomly picked this audiobook for a road trip. While the writing style isn’t great (it took a while for me to get used to it), the story was complex, the characters were memorable, and I laughed out loud several times. I had never heard of this author or this series, but I really enjoyed it. I would definitely read another book by this author again.
(There is some violence and swearing; no graphic sex.)
I love all of the books in the Andy Carpenter series.
This is just one of the series. The author is extremely witty, and his main character is the primary purveyor of sarcasm. Each of his books is worth a read. I have gotten through the first nine in the series, all equally entertaining. These are not self edification read, these are just fun down time reads.
This book (like Hounded, the previous one) is a big improvement over the three that preceded them.
In those books, Rosenfelt lost his ‘voice’ that made his earliest works so enjoyable. His wry observations sounded stale and shopworn, when and where he used them predictable. Wherever he mislaid his voice in those books, he found it again. Andy Carpenter sounds like the Andy Carpenter I remember from the first books in the series.
He also pulled back some from the ‘save the world’ plotlines that infested those same books, returning to having Andy defending a local man from a murder charge. But not enough. The outfall of Andy failing here is still larger than it needs to be.
Sadly, Rosenfelt still writes chapters in other characters’ POVs. They weaken the book because they take the reader out of the flow of Andy’s narration – the true strong point of Rosenfelt’s writing. It wouldn’t be as great an effect if they appeared regularly, but their erratic occurrence makes shift more noticeable, having a bigger impact on the flow.
And he still relegates the dogs – once a key element of these novels – to bit player status. Come on, Mr. Rosenfelt, get back on track here.
I was ready to give up on Rosenfelt after Unleashed, but he’s redeemed himself somewhat with these last two books. Now I hope he continues down the road he’s on with them.