David Rosenfelt. Dachshund Through the Snow. St. Martin’s, 2019.
David Rosenfelt has developed a cottage industry writing lawyer stories with titles suggesting dogs and Christmas. Dachshund Through the Snow is the twentieth in the series featuring lawyer Andy Carpenter. His wife Laurie is a retired police detective. Carpenter inherited a lot of money so he does not have to work for a living, but he takes cases that appeal to him.
Laurie, meanwhile, loves Christmas and begins her countdown to Christmas November 1 and keeps the decorations up and Christmas music playing till February 1. The first person narrator, though, is Andy, who seems to enjoy the holidays mostly because of the sports on TV. In other words, the actual celebration of the holiday is peripheral to the story. So are dogs, but not entirely so.
The story begins with a moving dog story. A K-9 cop is retiring and wants his dog companion to retire also because of arthritis, something typical of older German Shepherds. Department policy says that Simon the Shepherd has another year to go, which could be bad for his health and shorten his life. Andy goes to court on behalf of the cop to retire Simon and take him home.
The main story involves a curious twist from the usual news stories we hear these days. Three years ago I heard the testimony of a man who spent eighteen years in prison for a crime he did not commit. He was exonerated when a DNA test proved he was not the rapist. He admits, though, he was in the area doing a drug deal, so he was not exactly innocent of a crime. In recent years we have heard many such stories. There are even a couple of foundations specializing in doing DNA tests on older evidence that will sometimes set prisoners free.
In Dachshund Through the Snow, an apparently innocent man is suddenly arrested for a fourteen-year-old murder because a online genealogy DNA test came close to matching DNA found at the site of the murder. His skin was even found under the fingernails of the female victim. Both he and the victim were teens at the time.
It is an open and shut case for the prosecution until Carpenter realizes that he is being followed. Soon after he discovers this, the two men following him are murdered. This case which at first seemed to be teenage tryst gone wrong ends up involving someone wanted by Interpol in multiple countries. What is going on? And why?
Though the title may be a little misleading because it has little to do with Christmas or dachshunds, this novel has a very clever plot. The story telling is funny; some of the humor is at the expense of the New York Giants. (What can I say? It came out this year.) But the crime is serious, and it reminds us that those who are good at what they do, like Attorney Carpenter, have to have good people working for them.