Skip to main content

Book Review: Dog on it (A Chet and Bernie mystery) by Spencer Quinn

Image
By

Review: Dog on it (A Chet and Bernie mystery) by Spencer Quinn
Published in Australia by Arena Books, imprint of Allen & Unwin, 2009
Spencer Quinn online and on Amazon
This book caught my eye purely because of the cover. I loved the illustration style and the look on the dog’s face. When I read on the back blurb that the story is narrated by the dog, I was sold. Stephen King’s recommendation didn’t hurt either.

Chet, the dog, lives with his human, Bernie Little, owner of the Little Detective Agency. They’re both ex-police. Chet was heading to the top of his canine class, but there was a rogue event in his final exam. That’s how Chet and Bernie became a team. Chet and Bernie have money – sorry, cash-flow – troubles, a cranky ex-wife, and a kid whom they both adore and who adores them, but whom they don’t get to see as often as they’d like. Bernie drives a beat-up, old Porsche convertible, like good PIS should, and Chet always rides shotgun.

Mostly, Chet and Bernie do divorce cases because they pay (most of) the bills. But their speciality is missing persons. In this story, they’ve got a kid who may or may not be missing. Can Chet and Bernie afford to stay on the case a) if there isn’t actually a case, and b) they’re not being paid for it?

I really enjoyed the narration by Chet, the dog. Humans and their worlds get described a lot in terms of their scents; Chet tunes out of the boring descriptive conversations to have naps; and we get to see Chet’s observations on tiny human reactions during the questioning of suspects.

The bond between Chet and Bernie is beautifully shown. We get to see exactly how Bernie is feeling through Chet’s eyes:
'Bernie nodded, the proud confident nod, my favourite. “They call him Chet the Jet.”'
And
In a moment when someone tells Bernie he can’t possibly be a parent to ask the question he just asked: 'The expression on Bernie’s face changed again, went cold for a moment, and then just nothing. I hated seeing that just-nothing look on Bernie’s face. I went over and sat at his feet. He didn’t seem to notice.'
Chet, you lovely boy.

If I’ve got the smallest bone to pick, it’s that Chet’s first encounter with the bad guys is initiated by the bad guys in a move that logically doesn’t make much sense to me. It moves the plot along, of course, in that Chet gets to see and smell the bad guys, but can’t tell Bernie about it. But I just gave that bone to the dogs and kept reading.

The action keeps romping along. At a couple of points in the story, Chet is separated from Bernie, and the stakes are truly ramped up for Chet as he has to deal with a human world in trying to get back to Bernie. It’s all the more nerve-wracking because Chet describes events in a way where he doesn’t know what’s going to happen next, but we, as the readers, do. My heart got well and truly stuck in my throat at too many points in Chet’s adventures.

My next step: sniff out the other books in the series.


Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Sun and the Moon

By
The following little story came to me while driving home one night on a dark road lit up in silver by a half-moon.  I suddenly had a fanciful little image of a car smilingly gobbling up a crescent-shaped sliver of moon-flake which helped its headlights shine brighter.  Such an image wouldn't normally find a home outside my head, but
7 comments
Read more

Making Mauritius-Style Banana Cakes (Gateaux Bananes)

By
I mis-managed my bananas. I got my timing all wrong and they were suddenly too ripe and too spotted and dotted to eat, and were sitting there looking at me with accusatory and reproachful looks. Banana cake was the obvious solution. But why go the way of regular banana cake, when there's the distant call of Mauritius-style gateaux bananes (you guessed it: banana cakes). 
4 comments
Read more

I saw a UFO

By
In September 2024, while I was on the west coast of Mauritius, an island in the Indian Ocean, I saw an unidentified flying object (UFO). My LittleOne and I were on a rooftop balcony. We were staring idly above the tops of the trees to the west, where there was still the faintest leftover pineapple glow in the sky. Then, we shifted our gaze slightly to the same tops of the trees, but in the south-west, where the sky had already darkened to a soft, purpley-crimson.  There were three stars in the sky. One of the stars, just above the tree line was smudged. As though it had a faint mist around it. The other two stars, by contrast, were perfectly clear. In the above photo ( not taken on the UFO evening), if you look closely, you can see two stars. The third, smudged star was to the left of these two stars. I pointed out the smudgy star to LittleOne and wondered out loud 'why was it smudged?' There were no clouds in the sky. As we stared at it, we realised the smudgy star was actuall...
Post a Comment
Read more