Penned

August 1, 2018
A sleuthing veterinarian plays cat and mouse with a serial killer.Introduced to elderly Gloria LaGuardia at the Oak Falls, New York, Halloween party, Dr. Kate Turner finds her both confused and afraid of someone evil she's just seen. So when police officer and law student Luke Gianetti, her friend, tells Kate that Gloria's been strangled in an apparent burglary, she's suspicious that there may be more to the story. Kate has some romantic feelings for Luke, but he's still entangled with his high school girlfriend, and she's dating her college boyfriend, Jeremy, though their long-distance relationship is challenging. At Gloria's funeral, Kate meets Tucker Weinstein, who's writing a book about a fugitive killer named Carl Wolf, who was living across the street from Gloria when he murdered his wife and children 21 years ago. Interviews Tucker gives to promote his book, in which he mentions Kate, make them both targets of the killer, who may now be living nearby. When Tucker is badly beaten near his Brooklyn home, the police think it's a hate crime because Tucker is gay. But Kate suspects the Big Bad Wolf. As she goes about her business treating everything from randy goats to an intelligent cockatoo, her connection to dogs involved in Schutzhund training gives her a new lead. Wolf had a Schutzhund-trained German shepherd that he loved enough to leave alive when he fled. A talk with the dog's retired veterinarian, who remembers Wolf and Brownie well and was surprised the FBI never interviewed him, gives her the idea to look into people in the area interested in that special training. She wonders if she's getting paranoid when she feels that she's being followed. Learning too much for her own good, Kate works to unmask the killer before he makes her his next target.Veterinarian Brady (Chained, 2017, etc.) imbues this page-turner with authentic details about a vet and the critters she treats.

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August 13, 2018
It’s Halloween in Brady’s entertaining fourth mystery featuring no-nonsense veterinarian Kate Turner (after 2017’s Chained), and Main Street in Oak Falls, N.Y., is crowded with assorted zombies, princesses, and ghouls. Kate spots a harried middle-aged woman attempting to persuade her befuddled aunt, Gloria LaGuardia, to wait for her while she tracks down her rambunctious teenage children. Kate steps up to help. It soon becomes clear that Gloria is suffering from dementia. She thinks she recognizes a face here and there, but the names are beyond the reach of her memory. Suddenly, she grips Kate’s arm and says, “It all came back to me just now. Someone evil is here. I saw him.” A few days later Gloria is dead, and Kate is roped into a search for a murderer who has been successfully hiding out from the FBI for 21 years. Animal lovers won’t mind that the mystery solving takes a back seat to a wealth of fascinating pet lore, including how to clip a cockatoo’s toenails and the proper method for tick removal.