Spencer Quinn. Heart of Barkness. Macmillan, 2019.
___. Scents and Sensibility. Simon, 2015.
___. The Dog Who Knew Too Much. Simon, 2011.

We have a growing fondness for the Chet and Bernie mysteries. Heart of Barkness does not disappoint. As in all the stories, the reader gets the narrative from the dog’s perspective.

I recall reading once that the dogs have the mental capacity of a human two-year-old, except, of course, for speech. That is really what reading Heart of Barkness and the other Chet and Bernie mysteries is like: a story from a literate two-year-old child—easily distracted, excited about almost anything, loyal to their authority figure.

And in this case, very funny.

Lotty Pilgrim is an over-the-hill singer-songwriter. She had one really big hit in the seventies, but now she is playing in smaller venues. Private Detective Bernie Little has liked her stuff, so he goes to a local club to hear her when she comes to town. He gives her a big tip in her tip jar. Chet tells us it is a C-note. Almost immediately someone steals the tip and runs outside.

The young thief opens a car door, but Chet is on the chase, so the young man ends up running away, but not before Bernie gets the money back. Bernie tells the club’s big bouncer what happened. The bouncer removes the car’s steering wheel to make it difficult for the thief, when he does return, to drive away without announcing himself.

A day later, Bernie’s friend Nixon who owns a car repair and detailing shop tells him that he is fixing the car. The bill is being paid for by—of all people—Lotty Pilgrim.

That is weird to say the least. Bernie tracks down Lotty, and it gets weirder and weirder. Of all the Chet and Bernie stories we have read so far, this is most mysterious. Nothing seems to make sense.

Shortly afterward, Lotty’s manager, another big man, is found stabbed to death in Lotty’s house. She confesses to the murder but admits she remembers nothing because she had blacked out from drinking. Although the local sheriff is excited to arrest a famous person, Bernie and at least one other person realize that a woman of Lotty’s size and build could not have done it.

Meanwhile, someone attempts to break into Bernie’s house. The same unnamed but muscular, well-dressed individual seems to show up in a few other places that Bernie is checking out. Let us say that the encounters are not only mysterious but also unpleasant.

Heart of Barkness takes a lot of digging—both figuratively and literally—to get to the bottom of things. And Chet, thanks to his superior nose, actually saves the day. While the title is essentially a simple literary joke, there are a few serious matters of the heart revealed in this mystery.

Scents and Sensibility turns into a wild story. Bernie’s neighbors the Parsons have a son who just got out of prison after serving fifteen years for kidnapping. He bought them a big saguaro cactus for their yard—this is Arizona.

It turns out that the cactus was obtained illegally. It is an endangered species, and many wild saguaros including this one have a microchip implanted in them. The Arizona Department of Agriculture was able to track it. A DOA agent shows up at the Parsons’ house and says that she will press charges on the elderly Mr. Parsons. (Mrs. Parsons has been in the hospital.)

The next day, workmen from the state come to remove the cactus and return it to the place where it came from. Bernie thinks the DOA agent has been too rough on Mr. Parsons and goes out to the spot in the desert where the cactus came from to find her. He finds her—but she has been murdered.

Murdered over a cactus? Obviously, there is more going on…

Oh yeah, around the same time as the cactus shows up next door, someone steals a safe from Bernie’s house. No sign of forced entry, and Chet smells hints of Iggy, the Parsons’ dog. Remember, these stories are told from the dog’s point of view.

Billy Parsons and another young man named Travis Baca were convicted of kidnapping a young woman about their age. Her wealthy father paid the ransom, and the two young men (both around twenty at the time) were caught a few days later. The half a million dollar ransom was never recovered, and its seems pretty clear that neither young man was the brains behind the operation.

There is a lot of action in this one: car chases, explosions, fist fights, gun fights. The kidnapping plot turns out to be far more elaborate than the official version. The story involves a gang, drug dealers, a mysterious prison death, a wino, a ranch that raises miniature horses, a dog that suspiciously resembles Chet, and even a Burning Man type desert festival called Cactus Man.

As always, told from Chet’s engaging and funny canine perspective, Scents and Sensibility is a well-told tale.

The Dog Who Knew Too Much was actually the fourth in the Chet and Bernie series. We had missed this one earlier.

An attractive divorcee hires Bernie, accompanied by Chet of course, to accompany her as she picks up her son at a summer camp in the mountains of the neighboring state. So what is the big deal? Parents all over North America do that weekly during the summer without hiring a private detective…

Anya says she wants to do it so her ex-husband, who is supposed to be there as well, will leave her alone. She says it is because he wants to get back together, but we learn there are other more significant reasons as well.

When they arrive at the camp, son Devin is missing. Turk, the counselor who took the boys on the hike when Devin disappeared, takes Chet and Bernie on the trail to the place where the boys camped and then to an abandoned mine they explored.

(This is vaguely in the American Southwest. Bernie lives in Arizona not too far from Mexico. Since Chet remembers surfing, the neighboring state is most likely California.)

Hardly a trace of the boy is found except for a scrap of cloth apparently torn from his shirt that has his name on it. Chet loses his scent when he comes to a stream.

Bernie and Chet return later to explore the mine themselves and come across a crusty miner everyone calls Moondog. Moondog is not happy to see anyone in his mine, but Chet discovers the body of Turk the camp counselor with a bullet in his head.

Oh, and when Bernie does not return when he said he would, his girlfriend Suzie drives up to the camp to look for him. She happens to arrive when Bernie is trying to comfort Devin’s mother. She drives off without even saying hello. So, yes, it gets complicated.

It gets even more complicated as Bernie is arrested for the murder of Turk and Chet is dognapped by someone Chet (and Bernie) had trusted. Did I mention that when he was a boy, Devin’s father had gone to the same camp?

This is a mystery and a very suspenseful one.

All the Chet and Bernie books are fun to read, but Heart of Barkness is the deepest mystery of these three, Scents and Sensibility has the most action, and The Dog Who Knew Too Much is the most suspenseful. As Chet would say, it’s all good.

One note on the titles: All the Chet and Bernie books have titles that are word plays on other works. Here we note Heart of Darkness, Sense and Sensibility, and The Man Who Knew Too Much. The titles only vaguely relate to the actual stories, but they do indicate the writer’s cleverness which stands out in the dog’s-nose-view in the narration.