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Mason "Mace" Reid's wife is gone for good and has moved on. His present home is small and shared with three great dogs. His depression is huge and doubly fueled: a failed marriage he didn't intend to fail at and the death of his fourth and most special dog, the Springer Spaniel trained to search out and find human remains. Mace makes roughly half his annual income training all kinds of dogs – one friend refers to him as the "Dog Whisperer" – most of them the usual personal pet sort but some the K-9 sort and a very few in his greatest skill set: dogs trained to find decomposing human bodies. He contracts out to the Chicago Police Department, successfully enough by now that they call and he drops everything and moves in.
A local creep dies by his own hand of carbon monoxide poisoning and in the process seriously poisons the Golden Retriever puppy his wife got for their son and that he hated. How the puppy survived the incident is beyond human understanding but it recovers and goes to the public animal care facility and Mace takes it, love at first sight.
He names her Elvira, quickly regrets that and shortens it to just Vira. Long before he plans to begin her training, he takes her along to his classes for pets and discovers her behind him doing everything he asks the pets to do. Well, whatever the opposite of lemons is, Vira's it in the world of picking up what she's being trained to do. Not really. She is some kind of genius. I learned a ton, by the way, about the enormous advantages dogs have over humans in the arena of the sense of smell. They are light years ahead of us. What becomes clear on the first case Mace takes Vira on is that she not only picks up the obvious scents of the deceased person, but also of those who were recently with that person and she can hone in on those persons: in this first case, Vira spots the murderer gawking at the crime scene and attacks him.
From there, after working out how not to let Vira be put down as vicious, the novel explores the ways in which Mace is trained by Vira to understand her signals and respond to them as they uncover the long trail of murders of which her first case was just one example and the enormously skilled and clever serial killer behind them.
This is a grand entry into a new series. I once sneered at "dog" mysteries, but I have grown up long since. It's not the genre that determines the quality of the novel at all. Author Jeffrey Burton's got a true winner here and I look forward to more.
§ Diana Borse is retired from teaching English at Texas A&M University-Kingsville and savoring the chance to read as much as she always wanted to.
Reviewed by Diana Borse, May 2020
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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