This is a fun mystery featuring an amateur sleuth and his clever dog.
Background: Forty-two-year-old Steve Levitan is having a rough time. Until about a year ago, Steve was a technical writer and information expert in Silicon Valley.
Steve drifted into hacking and - to curb his wife's overspending - diddled with credit card databases. The police arrested Steve the next day, and while Steve was in prison, his wife divorced him and his father died.
Steve is now on parole and back in his hometown of Stewart's Crossing, Pennsylvania. There Steve resides in the townhouse his father left him, does freelance technical writing, and is a temporary adjunct professor at elite Eastern College, his alma mater.
Steve's parole officer, Santiago Santos, checks on Steve monthly to keep him on the straight and narrow. Santos installed keystroke software on Steve's computer, to insure Steve isn't hacking into forbidden records.
*****
Early in the book, Steve is taking an evening walk when he hears gunshots and sees a black SUV speed past him. It turns out Steve's neighbor, Caroline Kelly, was killed, and her golden retriever Rochester is homeless.
To make a long story short, Steve adopts Rochester, and feels compelled to help find the person who killed Rochester's mommy.
Luckily, Steve has renewed a boyhood acquaintance with Rich Stemper, who's now a police detective. This gives Steve the opportunity to stick his two cents into the Caroline Kelly investigation.
Steve has an advantage over the cops because Rochester has a doggy instinct for unearthing clues. For instance, Rochester sniffs out the bullet casing from the murder gun; lays a paw on a relevant 10-digit-number on a piece of paper; draws attention to an important letter; and so on.
While Steve is getting Rochester's toys from Caroline's house, he can't resist taking Caroline's laptop. Though Steve shouldn't, he uses Caroline's computer to hack into her records and look into her background, to see who might have wanted to kill her.
While all this is going on, Steve is approached by his childhood piano teacher, a widow named Edith Passis. Edith confides she can't keep up with her finances and is afraid someone's stealing from her. Edith tells Steve that Caroline Kelly - who worked in Edith's bank - was looking into things, but of course Caroline was shot to death.
This 'coincidence' is suspicious, and Steve goes on to hack into Edith's records. With Steve's hacking and snooping and interviewing people, he learns about Caroline's killer and Edith's thief. Steve then gives the information to Detective Stemper and justice is done.
Of course Steve also gets into BIG trouble with his parole officer and runs the risk of going back to prison!!!
This is a fun mystery, and it's entertaining to follow Steve as he plays with Rochester; investigates crimes; has coffee at the Chocolate Ear café; patronizes food trucks; assists the police; teaches classes; converses with students; chats with colleagues; and more.
Tangential characters tend to have kooky names like Candy Cane, Anna Rexick, and Lay Zee, which is amusing. (Author Neil Plakcy has a good sense of humor. 🙂)
I'm a fan of 'animal mysteries' and I like talking pets - like the pooch named Chet in Spencer Quinn's books, and the cat called Mrs. Murphy in Rita Mae Brown's novels. Rochester doesn't say a word, but I like him anyway.
Recommended to fans of cozy mysteries
Rating: 3.5 stars
No comments:
Post a Comment