Unleashed - David Rosenfelt

I guess it makes sense that if there are cat-lovers’ mysteries, there have to be dog-lovers’ mysteries, too. That’s fine with me – I’m about as dog-lovin’ as anyone you’ve met. Some of the “talking dog-based” mysteries are pretty lame (I’m thinking about Spencer Quinn’s Chet and Bernie series, if truth be told), and a couple of the dogs have gotten tiresome (Tee Tucker in the Rita Mae Brown Mrs. Murphy series). And then there’s the Andy Carpenter series, which doesn’t really have dogs at all – it’s a lawyer series with a dog suit on. I have to wonder if it would be better if  the dogs talked...

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Andy Carpenter’s buddy Sam missed his filght because he'd hit a dog. He was damned lucky, too – that plane crashed and the pilot, husband of Sam’s high-school sweetie, was killed. Except he was apparently already dead – the cops say it was murder. Denise, the suddenly very rich widow was (of course) charged with the crime, and Sam persuaded “the great Andy Carpenter” to defend her.

Naturally, all was not beer and skittles – and suddenly someone else ended up charged with the crime instead of Denise; someone very close to Andy. Everything hinged on why the deceased had been flying to Augusta, Maine, in the first place; and why the guy he was apparently headed there to meet was himself murdered within days. And that victim wasn’t the only one – suddenly, there were people croaking everywhere. For some reason, though, the cops didn’t think all those deaths had anything to do with Andy’s case. 

Guess he’ll have to investigate on his own (with the beauteous Laurie at his side, the invincible Marcus running protection, and a gaggle of octogenarians hacking merrily away in a hidden “bunker”). What they’re gonna find out is that all hell is scheduled to break loose, and someone sinister has been clearing away loose threads… Good thing Andy Carpenter has a Golden Retriever, ‘cause otherwise he’d be so stressed he couldn’t walk straight!

With almost a dozen semi-doggy mysteries (e.g., Play Dead and Hounded) under his belt, author David Rosenfelt had pretty much mapped out his format by the time he published Unleashed. There’s the introduction of his dogs, the introduction of his posse (including his secretary Edna, who never seems to speak, much less work) and then there's the requisite bitching about doing real work: you see, Andy Carpenter’s filthy rich, so he only works when forced to do so. The dogs (a pair of Golden Retrievers) in the stories likewise do darned near nothing most of the time, unlike some of the more irritating pooches of the blabbermouth variety (see the series named above).

For Unleashed, Rosenfelt jumps on the terrorist bandwagon (you knew he’d end up there some day, right?), but overall doesn’t get into details on anything much. Unlike writers who do some research – c.f. Jeffery Deaver – and therefore give critical details, Rosenfelt just writes down shit. About the only fact-based information in the book is the manner of death, and that probably all came straight out of Wikipedia. Readers are left with a pretty much bare-bones plot that doesn’t have any real twisties in it, and doesn’t provide the clues necessary for us to “play along.”
The series characters are tropes, for the most part (though you gotta give Rosenfelt props for wrinkled old hackers); such as Marcus – obviously based on Robert Parker’s Hawk from the Spenser series. The dogs aren’t even particularly interesting.

In the final analysis, I’d say that Rosenfelt has reached the point where he’s basially phoning it in. The past couple of installments in the series have been formulaic and fairly uninteresting when compared to earlier novels. Since I like dogs (but not the run-of-the-mill talking dog in a mystery series), I sure hope he can shake that off and get back to what put him on my map to begin with. Sadly, Unleashed isn’t it.