David Rosenfelt. Dog Day Afternoon. Minotaur, 2024.

Dog Day Afternoon by David Rosenfelt (not Patrick Mann) is the most recent of the Andy Carpenter legal mysteries. Fans of these books understand they will be getting an original, clever, and exciting tale. As is typical, the title and cover are a bit misleading, though a dog is very peripherally involved.

Carpenter is a semi-retired lawyer who supports and helps out at a dog shelter. So does his friend and sometime co-worker Marcus. Marcus has a friend who is in big trouble. Someone has entered a very well-known personal injury law firm and shot six people to death. Although the shooter was masked, one of the survivors recognizes him as Nick, a young “gopher” at the firm who had not come to work that day.

Nick has a very unusual story. He says that on that day he was mysteriously rendered unconscious outside his apartment, and when he came to, he was chained inside some kind of warehouse. He was there for a few days and then released on a highway median. He had a bag over his head in the car so he could not see where he had come from or where he was going. Whenever his two captors appeared to him, they were wearing masks.

Meanwhile, his face was all over the news. By the time they release him, a major manhunt has begun. Marcus and Andy convince him that he has to turn himself in. He insists he is innocent, but he was identified. Not only that, but a pistol was found near his apartment that matched the ballistics of the fatal bullets, and the pistol has his fingerprints.

To the district attorney, it looks like an open and shut case. Andy only takes the case because of Marcus’s insistence. Once again, Andy has to put together a team to defend Nick and see if (1) Nick is telling the truth and (2), if so, what really happened.

Included in the team are his wife who is a policewoman, a friend who is a computer expert, and Marcus. Marcus is a veteran who, shall we say, is very good at hand-to-hand combat.

The story really grabbed me this time, and I found it hard to put down. The crime was very cleverly planned, so the team that solves the mystery had to be even more clever.

In it we discover some people whom the law firm helped out, but who seemed to have been paid less than what they were told they would get—yet they did not complain about being short-changed. Though the story is set in New Jersey, the land of The Sopranos, there appears to be a connection with a criminal organization out of Chicago.

It seems as though there may have been two people at the firm who were specifically targeted by the killer, one of the partners who specialized in malpractice cases, and an insurance executive who happened to be meeting with that partner. No one seems to know what they were planning to discuss, but the partner had sent out an email that he did not want anyone to leave work early that day because he would have an important announcement.

Slowly, maybe too slowly, what actually happened that day becomes clearer. In the meantime there are a couple of more murders of people who may have had connections to the crime. Andy and his friends may be in danger themselves. The mystery becomes a thriller, and an exciting one at that. Very clever, a bit complicated, but also something we can imagine. Since most of the tale is told in the first person, we know that Andy is still alive as he is telling the story, but there are some close calls…