Paw and Order (A Dog Club Mystery Book 4)
V. M. Burns
Kensington Pub.
August 11th, 2020
Paw and Orderby V. M. Burns is a fun cozy mystery. She has found her rhythm with engaging characters and enthralling plots. The humans and four-legged animals only enhance the story.
Burns noted, “A lot of what happened throughout the series has happened to me. Lilly moves to Tennessee because I moved there. She gets another dog because I got another dog. I was going to get a silver Toy Poodle and to name him Rex, as Lilly did in the story. Instead, I fell in love with another Toy Poodle that I named Chloe. Another similarity, Lilly and I both are buying a house we were renting. The ideas for this book came from my normal life. In both our lives dogs play such an important role.”
The story has Lilly Echosby convincing an eccentric poodle-loving billionaire Archibald Lowry to sponsor a fundraiser for the Eastern Tennessee Poodle Rescue. Unfortunately, he is murdered at the event, leaving his puppy poodle an orphan. Lilly’s best friend Scarlett “Dixie” Jefferson, a dog trainer and dog show judge, who lives with her husband, Beau, and two champion standard poodles, convinces Lilly to foster the puppy. Her own beloved poodle, Aggie, named after Agatha Christie, gets along well with the new puppy, renamed Rex after the mystery author Rex Stout. Falling in love with the puppy, Lilly decides to adopt it. As she welcomes Rex into her home, there are attempted poodle-nappings that were foiled. Lilly begins to wonder if the attempts to steal Rex have anything to do with the deaths that have recently occurred. Lilly, Dixie, and the members of Dixie’s dog club will put their heads together to help the police with their investigation. This includes her boyfriend Red, her daughter Stephanie, and her daughter’s boyfriend Joe Harrison, a K-9 handler for the Lighthouse Dunes Indiana police force.
“I wanted to give a shout out to mystery author Rex Stout. He wrote the “Nero Wolfe series.” I am a big Agatha Christie fan, which is why Lilly’s poodle is named Aggie, after Agatha Christie, but my second favorite author is Rex Stout. The main character is a genius who is a recluse living in his brownstone New York place. He is a private detective. But he doesn’t leave his home so he has an assistant, Archie Goodwin, that does all the leg work.”
The characters are multidimensional and readers learn a bit more about them in each book. The plot is fun and engaging with the added bonus describing specific breeds.
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