Early for a Christmas read. I usually don't want anything to do with that holiday until after Thanksgiving. I'm a one holiday at a time girl, but I needed something funny but one that also holds my attention. I just adore this series. Parker is humorous, self deprecating and sarcastic. The dialogue is amusing and it's hard not to love a character who loves dogs. Sebastian, the hound, has a big personality of his own.

Good cases, great characters and I'm including the dogs in that assessment. After all, as all dog lovers know, dogs are people too.

Grover Gardner is Andy and as always his narration rocks.

3.5 (and I’m not going to round up)

It seems like I was just reviewing one of the Andy Carpenter books! I should never complain about getting too many books in a series after some of the droughts my favorite authors have put me through.

With this book, as with all of the others, I listened to the audio narration by Grover Gardner. He annoyed me a little at the start but, to me, has become the essence of Andy Carpenter like a comfortable shoe or the spot on the couch that fits you because you’ve sat there so much. This Andy Carpenter follows the same formula as most of them, but with a bit more on the New Jersey-wide front, rather than international. It primarily centers around a gang and its ties with the mafia. What kind of world is it when gangs can’t even be saved major conglomerate takeover?! Spoiler: there isn’t an international paid assassin to be found!

Since it happens at the very beginning, I guess it’s not a spoiler, but it seems absurd that anyone can come and arrest someone in the witness protection program under their original name. Even if the state programs are in shambles compared to the federal program, you would think that at a minimum there would be some sort of flag in their record, especially when they have a record, that says go see the higher ups who can then stop them. What a disaster that could be!

On the dog front, you don’t really get a sense of the guest dogs. The murder suspect has adopted both a golden retriever and a Dalmatian who are just kind of in the background. I think it would’ve been better to just have the Dalmatian like on the cover, which is a new breed for this series. Why upset Tara when it doesn’t add anything to the plot to make her one of two goldens?
Just to sum things up: for you Tara fans, she takes it well, but is essentially, though not literally, competing with another golden whose name I can’t even remember.

For you dalmatian fans, it is not the center character that you hope for when you see the cover. For you Edna fans, you will be disappointed that there’s only a couple of mentions of her name and no actual appearances. I guess that’s the risk you take when you add an extra guest dog in a novella. There isn’t enough space for everyone. For you bassett fans, keep the dream alive! Maybe someday Sebastian will get a little more street cred. In fact, with two more big dogs staying in the house, they stick him in the yard to take care of his business instead of going on walks because he slows everyone else down. They say he prefers it that way, but I think that’s just convenient. My idea is that we bassett lovers should get another basset hound buck, perhaps with a girl Basset who gets Sebastian moving a bit faster to impress her.

I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for providing an unbiased review.