Three
dogs, two murders and a cat, by Rodney Strong.
Cosy Crime is now an established genre in TV series and
books; there’s always a satisfying
ending that no-one saw coming and it can be guaranteed not to strain the brain
too much about Life, the Universe and Everything. Such a story is Three dogs etc. etc., but
what is definitely and enormously entertaining about it is that it is set in
Wellington, New Zealand’s capital city:
for that reason alone, locals will love reading about all the novel’s
improbable events with their city as the backdrop.
And protagonist Nicolette Briggs is definitely a Private
Detective with a difference: she doesn’t
do Humans. She investigates crimes against animals – sometimes with her fists
if the need arises. Unsurprisingly, she
doesn’t make much money, but as we all know there are always plenty of cases of
animal cruelty that need investigating, and she has a stellar reputation,
eventually receiving a call from an aged member of the Silvermoon Retirement
Village concerning a cat that is in a bad way:
according to the local vet it has been poisoned and, even though no resident owns this feline friend, they
don’t want anything to happen to her, and hope
that Nicolette can ferret out who officially owns her and if she was
poisoned deliberately.
Fair enough, Nicolette needs the money as her car
requires urgent attention (a newer model would be great, but is an impossible
dream, especially with a teenage daughter at a private school) so: the first thing to find out is the identity
of the true owner of the cat who, it transpires, lives (officially, anyway) in
one of the properties adjoining the village, but true to form, everything gets
very murky when the body of a young woman is found in the bath of the same
property – then one of Nicolette’s rescue dogs is taken from her car, causing
her to get very angry with the thief
to the extent that she is witnessed assaulting him, which is not a good look when he becomes the next murder
victim: the plot thickens!
Rodney Strong states that this is the first of a series
of books featuring Nicolette and her unorthodox and sometimes physical ways of fighting
crime – which is just as well; she comes
from a very confusing group of relatives thanks to her mother’s several
marriages and it’s hard to keep them all in their places – likewise his
cavalier use of apostrophes: they can
be tricky little things! Having said that, it was great to travel
around our lovely capital with Nicolette, unafraid to get physical when the
defenceless can’t: Cosy Crime can be
fun! FOUR STARS
No comments:
Post a Comment