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A Hell Of A Dog is the third Rachel Alexander mystery from Carol Lea Benjamin, with the New York dog-trainer-turned-PI attending a professional dog-training conference in upstate New York when one of the celebrity trainers dies in what looks like an accident and is not. The Rachel Alexander series uses Benjamin's actual working knowledge of the dog-training world, and A Hell Of A Dog is the entry where that specialist knowledge gets fully showcased.
Benjamin's strength in this novel is the conference texture. The competing training schools, the political rivalries between dominance-based and reward-based practitioners, the specific physical and behavioral observations that Rachel makes about the various dogs in attendance, are all rendered with the kind of insider precision the form rarely allows. Fans of Susan Conant's Holly Winter mysteries or Laurien Berenson's Melanie Travis novels will find A Hell Of A Dog the more technically rigorous of the dog-cozy traditions.
Dashiell, Rachel's Pit Bull, gets significant page time and is one of the more genuinely characterized animals in any PI series.
Four stars. Recommended for readers who love dogs and for mystery readers who want specialist-knowledge fiction. The Rachel Alexander series is one of the most underread dog-mystery sequences. Read in series order for the strongest payoff; A Hell Of A Dog assumes some familiarity with the earlier books.
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