Publisher: Gallery Books
Series: Gin & Tonic #1
Format Read: Trade Paperback
Release Date: November 13, 2012
Buying Links: Amazon Barnes & Noble The Book Depository
Book Blurb (from goodreads)
They rely on animal instincts…
Meet “Gin” and “Tonic.” She’s a dog person.
He’s a cat person. But when these two friendly rivals team up to solve a
mystery, you can bet their pets aren’t the only ones getting collared…
Ginny Mallard and her
shar-pei, Georgie, are about to run out of kibble and cash, unless she
digs up another client for her private concierge business. So she heads
to her neighborhood Seattle bar, Mary’s, to sniff out an opportunity. Or
a gimlet or two. The bartender, Teddy Tonica, is usually good for a
round of challenging banter, and Georgie is oddly fond of his bar cat,
Mistress Penny.
Before she can say
“bottoms up,” Ginny lands a job tracking down some important business
papers that have gone missing—along with the customer’s uncle. If Ginny
hopes to track him down, she’ll need more than her research skills:
she’ll need a partner with people skills—like Tonica.
This is one
dangerous case that’s about to go to the dogs—unless man, woman, cat,
and canine can work together as one very unconventional crime-solving
team.
Quote:
Ginny was good at making lists. That was what she had done when she went home last night: put together the list of people she thought might be useful, adding and subtracting based on nothing more than gut instinct. She'd ended up with five people, and a sense of satisfaction in a job well done.
And then, at three in the morning, with Georgie snoring at the end of the bed, it had hit her, waking her up with one of those unsettling stomach-turning epiphanies. She had been treating it like just another job-meet the client's needs, rearrange the world so that they are not inconvenienced or delayed. Only this wasn't a party, or a vacation, or even ferrying people to and from the hospital, which she'd done once for an elderly woman facing surgery. This was someone's life she was trying to manage. More than manage-potentially undercut. And it was the life of someone who was neither her client nor an underage dependent of her client. Someone who might have very good reasons to not want to be found.
Reviewed By: Bea
Bea's Thoughts:
L.A. Kornetsky is an alias for Laura Anne Gilman, who writes urban fantasies and under the name of Anna Leonard writes paranormal romances. I love her urban fantasies and I love mysteries so I was excited to hear about this book and have been waiting for it impatiently.
The cover makes it look like a cozy mystery but it's not nor is it cutesy. The latter was a possibility given the addition of the animals as part of the investigative team. Kornetsky plays it straight, not endowing the animals with human characteristics or special powers.
The relationship between the main humans, Ginny "Gin" Mallard and Teddy "Tonic" Tonica is complicated and until now, casual. She plays on a trivia team in the trivia competitions at the bar where Teddy works. When she takes on a job looking for a missing person, which is really stretching her role as a personal concierge, she enlists Teddy to help her, knowing that his people skills are better than hers.
The story is tightly written, the characterization deft and skillful and the story intriguing. Having read her urban fantasies, which all contain mysteries as part of their plots, I had no doubt of Kornetsky's ability to write a straight-up mystery and she didn't disappoint. I got tired at times of the constant sniping Teddy and Ginny engage in and I also questioned Teddy's willingness to help Ginny. Yes, she appealed to his competitive side but it seemed unlikely. Despite those issues, I enjoyed the story and I'll definitely read the next one.
I borrowed this from my local library.
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