Friday Memes: The Twelve Dogs of Christmas by David Rosenfelt

 Happy Friday everybody!

Book Beginnings on Friday is now hosted by Rose City Reader. The Friday 56 is hosted at Freda's Voice. Check out the links above for the rules and for the posts of the participants each week. Don’t dig for your favorite book, the coolest, the most intellectual. Use the CLOSEST.

Beginning:

"You looking for work?"

The guy in the pickup asked the question, but he had to have already known the answer. He was at the convenience store at the edge of town where the young men hung out when they needed money and were willing to spend the day working for it.

Friday 56:

Both the police and the writer of every article I am able to find believed that the target was Parker, misnamed Little Tiny because he was six foot four, 250 pounds. Everyone felt that Boyer and Barnett were unfortunate bystanders, Boyer being by far the most unfortunate of the two.

This week I am spotlighting a Christmas Mystery. The Twelve Dogs of Christmas by David Rosenfelt is the fifteenth book in the Andy Carpenter series which I am not reading in order. Here is the description from Amazon:

Defense lawyer Andy Carpenter usually tries to avoid taking on new cases at all costs. But this time, he’s happy―eager, even―to take the case that’s just come his way. Andy’s long-time friend Martha “Pups” Boyer takes in stray puppies that the local dog rescue center can’t handle, raises them until they’re old enough to adopt, and then finds good homes for them. Not everyone admires the work Pups does as much as Andy does, however. With Christmas just around the corner, one of Pups’s neighbors has just reported Pups to the city for having more than the legal number of pets in her home under the local zoning laws.

Andy happily takes Pups’s case, and he feels confident in a positive outcome. Who could punish someone for rescuing puppies, after all, especially at Christmastime? But things get a lot more complicated when Randy Hennessey, the neighbor who registered the complaint against Pups, turns up dead. Pups had loudly and publicly threatened Hennessey after he filed his complaint, and Pups was also the one to find his body. All the evidence seems to point to Pups as the killer, and suddenly Andy has a murder case on his hands. He doesn’t believe Pups could be guilty, but as he starts digging deeper into the truth behind Hennessey’s murder, Andy may find himself facing a killer more dangerous than he ever imagined.

With his trademark wit, larger-than-life characters, and clever plotting, David Rosenfelt delivers another gripping mystery.