Muzzled

May 1, 2020
Paterson's laziest lawyer, Andy Carpenter, is dragged from sort-of-retirement back to sort-of-work by one of the world's most unlikely dog lovers. Weeks after three top employees of Pharmacon--Alex Vogel, Stephen Mellman, and Robert Giarrusso--are blown up aboard Vogel's boat off Long Beach Island, speech therapist Beth Morris, whose obsessive hobby is reuniting lost dogs with their owners, gets a phone call from Daniel Simmons claiming ownership of Lucy, a yellow Lab Andy's Tara Foundation has been sheltering. That would be perfectly normal and even great news if Beth didn't recognize Simmons' voice as that of Alex Vogel. At a hastily arranged reunion with Lucy, Vogel admits he escaped the blast that destroyed his boat after the two colleagues who'd been planning to launch a new company with him had already been shot. Not surprisingly, he's arrested for their murders, leaving Andy with an awful lot of circumstantial evidence to explain. Since Rosenfelt obligingly identifies the real killers as Charlie Phillips and Orlando Bledsoe and since Vogel had recently been dating Carla D'Antoni, the late girlfriend of premier New Jersey mobster Joseph Russo Jr., the only mystery is what pharmaceutical secret provided the motive for the murder. And even that secret is broadly hinted when Pharmacon Founder and CEO Eric Buckner tells Andy that the company's on the verge of releasing Loraxil, a medication for antibiotic-resistant infections. The resulting complications will appeal mainly to readers sheltering in place over their fears of other infections today's headlines might have told them about. One of Rosenfelt's least suspenseful cases despite its unsettlingly serendipitous relevance to the COVID-19 pandemic.

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May 25, 2020
Happily retired Andy Carpenter can never resist “unretiring” to help someone in trouble, as shown in Edgar finalist Rosenfelt’s intricately plotted 21st mystery featuring the Paterson, N.J., defense attorney (after 2019’s Dachshund Through the Snow). Beth Morris, director of the Tara Foundation, a dog rescue organization Andy supports, alerts Andy that Alex Vogel, who was reported killed in a recent boat explosion with two other men, is coming by to claim his lost dog. Vogel tells Andy that he’s the target of assassins—a tale both Andy and the police find hard to believe. When Vogel is arrested for the murder of the two other men, Andy agrees to represent him, because anyone who would risk his life to reunite with his beloved dog can’t be all bad. Andy and his crack investigative team must uncover the real killer before Vogel is convicted of murder—or murdered himself. The courtroom proceedings fascinate, and a shocking twist will catch readers by surprise. It’s a pleasure to spend time with bighearted Andy, a capable, self-aware, and witty lead, and his quirky teammates. Agent: Robin Rue, Writers House.

May 1, 2020
Lawyer, dog lover, work hater, and star of Rosenfelt's popular crime series, Andy Carpenter is back. As usual, the narrative is jump-started by a dog. A dog-rescuer friend of Andy's gets a call from a man who says, "You've got my dog. I want her back." But the caller supposedly died and was maybe murdered. Since Andy does criminal-defense work whenever he gets off his duff, and since he heads a dog-rescue foundation of his own, it's a no-brainer for the friend to call Andy, who meets the guy and finds out that he loves his dog and isn't so dead after all, prompting Andy to investigate. So begins a complex plot that involves stock fraud, the Russian Mafia, and money laundering. In the end, we might have preferred less of that and more of the riveting courtroom scenes that don't arrive until the 200-page point. Then there's the matter of Andy. Sure, we love the guy, but he protests too much about his ordinariness. Still, sometimes it works. When he has a tough guy accompany him to a dangerous meeting, it's because Andy's "closer to Mr. Rogers than Mr. T."(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)