83. A Dog Among Diplomats by J.F. Englert (Mystery) 305 p.

This is the sequel to A Dog About Town. It may be that my mood has improved, or that this book appeals more to my personal tastes, but I think I enjoyed this book far more than the first because the author has found his feet in the genre. Not that I didn’t like A Dog About Town, but A Dog Among Diplomats is something special.

For one thing, while its prequel had many amusing moments, this book was funny all the way through. Randolph has really come into his own as a narrator, with a lot of astute observations on human beings and Manhattan society.

Perhaps this is the best place to mention that, as the cover suggests, Randolph the narrator is a dog. To be precise, he is a portly Labrador Retriever with a brain as sharp as his body is round, and a particular fondness for literature. He and his owner, a young man named Harry, are both still grieving for Harry’s almost-fiancée, Imogen, who went out for bread one evening and never came back. Randolph knows that his mistress is still alive somewhere, but Harry doesn’t, until one evening he gets a phone call from the officer who was in charge of the missing person case.

Harry is called to the scene of a crime, where a young man has been drugged and strangled, his murdered body left under a parachute in his rented room in the boardinghouse where he apparently lived with Imogen. She herself has disappeared, and is the chief suspect in the investigation. Randolph no doubt that she is innocent, and sets out to clear her name with the unwitting help of Harry, a United Nations diplomat named Leopold, and an Australian lawyer who goes by the nickname “Blinko”.

Although this book has a number of priceless moments, I think my favourite is the one where Randolph proves his bibliophile credentials once and for all:

Leopold’s laptop had a pointing device, which was difficult to manipulate with my snout. Just as I was about the navigate to my e-mail account, my nose slipped and suddenly I found myself in an entirely different place, a magical place, an extraordinarily wonderful place. Somehow I had stumbled upon an online bookstore. With a few more snout strokes and keypad jabs, I made my way to a specific screen where, floating on the screen in near three-dimensionality, I found The Inferno of Dante (the Pinsky translation)…. Not only was the Dante for sale, but it had been paired with a second title that I longed to read, Joyce’s Ulysses (I had devoured his Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, courtesy of Imogen’s college collection). For a substantial discount a purchaser could get both books and a tote bag with Virginia Woolf’s profile emblazoned on both sides….

Lost in the moment, I added the two books (and the complimentary tote bag) to my shopping cart and , putting aside any ethical concerns, I hurriedly entered Harry’s credit-card number—which I easily recalled from the many times he had spoken it aloud when ordering food delivery. Then I typed in our address and selected Priority Delivery.

(pp. 169-170)

This book is fundamentally similar in style to A Dog About Town, but the humour is sharper, the plot tighter, and the characters more fully developed. The ongoing storyline of Imogen’s disappearance was more interesting, and the hint in the epilogue about where Randolph and Harry will be going next makes me eager for more books in this series!

ETA: I forgot to mention this, but my free copies of A Dog About Town and A Dog Among Diplomats were both signed for me by the author, which I thought was a really nice touch. Thanks, J.F. Englert!

Pages read: 24,357

Tags: 50 Book Challenge 2008, Bull Moose Dog Run, J.F. Englert