Book Review: Monty and Me (Golden Retriever, murder mystery)

Monty & Me, by Louisa Bennet (Clan Destine Press, 2021, 292 pp, $24.99 PB/$6.49 Kindle/$5.22 HC Int'l edition) Have fun watching Monty's inspiration, Pickles, at  https://lalarkin.com/cozy-mysteries/

If you loved Spencer Quinn's Chet and Bernie's baker's dozen (below) or his Bowser and Birdie series of three mystery novels for the younger set, you will also savor the Monty Dog Detective series which begins with Monty & Me. All are written, in part at least, from the dog's point of view with Monty educating us on a dog's life and loves (food, smells, ear rubs).

Monty's Three Lives

Monty Golden Retriever begins life as a guide dog whose voracious appetite causes him to lose his job. He then comes to live with Paddy, a bee scientist, whose murder Monty is unable to prevent because he, too, is stabbed, critically but not fatally. The dog's third life is spent with a budding detective who has to endure snide gender remarks on the job because she unknowingly messed up an undercover investigation by chatting up the suspect in a bar.

The Plot Thickens

Monty's person is murdered and Monty barely survives the attack. Luckily he ends up with a detective on the case, a Rose Sidebottom (after all, the story is set in England). Monty and company (and Rose) get into one scrape after another with the concomitant misunderstandings between the canine and human species. 

Superpowers! 

Our lovely Rose, however, has a superpower: she gets the tingles when someone is not telling the truth but she doesn't always trust those tingles. 

Monty, on the other hand, with his extraordinary sense of smell, understands human (hooman) language but can only converse with other dogs, and with cats, birds, rodents, and insects. Meet Celeste the ladybug private eye, Dante the magpie, Betty the rat, and three-legged Jake the Pit Bull, all who help Monty figure out 'who dun it.' But what good is that if you, a dog, can't tell the police who did it? 

Sidelines

Monty is picked up by the dog catcher and manages to escape from the pound only to get stabbed. Or was that vice versa? And Rose is put on probation and sometimes has to do scut work while other detectives get the exciting tasks. 

Rose and Monty, Outside and In

Author Louisa Bennet has fun with her readers starting with the unique cover illustration with our protagonists in silhouette. Rose or Monty also appear on each chapter's title page, alerting the reader to who will be the star of that chapter: Rose, the human detective, or Monty, Dog Detective. This reviewer noticed that on the cover, the girl is facing to the right and the dog is facing left, yet on the chapter title pages, their direction is usually reversed. One other mystery appears - why the chapter silhouettes are in different locations on the page for each chapter. Does this change signify anything in the chapter to come perhaps? Why does chapter 44 have no silhouette and why does chapter 41 depict both Rose and Monty?

Suggestions

We suggest you set aside a couple of evenings or an entire empty afternoon to race through all of Monty & Me. With a plethora of characters and a convoluted plot full of surprising twists and turns, you may even want to take notes.

Set in England, you will also run into new vocabulary words but they don't slow the reader down - just don't test me on too many of them. 

And, of course, if you have read DogEvals' reviews over the years, you will know that we prefer chapter titles rather than just chapter numbers. But Monty does have something we really really like - very short chapters (1-5 pages), even if there are 51 of them.

And The Future Is. . . .

I can see Monty's adventures being made into a movie, or a feature-length cartoon, or a series of short stories or picture books for children. And who wouldn't want a Monty of their own?

Monty tells us all about dog's sense of smell: how a dog can pick out odors from days ago and pick out several simultaneous odors: people can smell spaghetti sauce but dogs can detect the tomatoes and the garlic and the pepper and all the other ingredients. I wonder what Monty will teach us humans in the next book, The Bone Ranger.

I can't wait to read The Bone Ranger! I have never read an author with such a unique, creative way of describing things so humorously (or humourously, as Bennet would write). Your eyes will be opened to better appreciate your own dog, thanks to Monty.