{"id":4030,"date":"2021-05-07T06:58:26","date_gmt":"2021-05-07T13:58:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/?p=4030"},"modified":"2021-05-07T06:58:26","modified_gmt":"2021-05-07T13:58:26","slug":"kylie-logan-a-trail-of-lies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/kylie-logan-a-trail-of-lies\/","title":{"rendered":"Kylie Logan: A Trail of Lies"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>This is the third novel in Kylie Logan\u2019s Jazz Ramsey series, and a contribution to the growing number of mystery novels featuring cadaver dogs or rescue dogs.\u00a0 Books by Paula Munier, Margaret Mizushima, Diane Kelly, Spencer Quinn, Robert Crais and David Rosenfelt all celebrate dogs in differing degrees.\u00a0 Logan\u2019s is perhaps the least \u201cdoggy\u201d series, though Jazz\u2019s cadaver dog in training, Wally, not only deepens Jazz\u2019s character, he advances the plot.<\/p>\n

Jazz is an administrative assistant at a Catholic girl\u2019s school in her hometown of Cleveland, and as a hobby, she\u2019s training Wally to be a cadaver dog.\u00a0 While he\u2019s still learning, he\u2019s come in handy in the first two books, and this one is no different.\u00a0 Jazz is dating undercover officer Nick, who has asked her to keep an eye on his alcoholic mom, Kim.\u00a0 When Jazz gets a call from Kim in the middle of the night insisting Nick is dead in her back yard \u2013 and that she killed him \u2013 Jazz rushes over.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s nothing in the backyard and while Kim is sticking to her story, she\u2019s also really drunk, so Jazz, swallowing her irritation and the necessity of keeping tabs of her boyfriend\u2019s mother, tucks Kim up on the sofa and heads home.\u00a0 The next day she brings Wally over after work to have him search the yard for a cadaver scent and to help put Kim\u2019s mind at ease. Wally doesn\u2019t alert, but Kim is still sticking to her story.<\/p>\n

When a body is found a few days later, near Kim\u2019s but not in her yard, the plot thickens.\u00a0 Jazz brings over a friend\u2019s dog, one who\u2019s more advanced in his training, to sweep Kim\u2019s yard again, and this time, he does alert.\u00a0 Not only that, when the cops stop by on a neighborhood door to door asking about the dead man, Jazz is sure she\u2019s seen a photo of him of Kim\u2019s kitchen table though neither woman says anything about it, and Kim denies having known him.<\/p>\n

Jazz is determined to peel back the layers of the mystery of both the photo on Kim\u2019s kitchen table as well as the identity of the dead man, so she starts asking questions, much to the annoyance of her boyfriend when he finds out what\u2019s happening.\u00a0 She does get into physical danger but I appreciated that the main incident happened through no fault of her own \u2013 i.e., she headed into no abandoned buildings or remote locations on her own.<\/p>\n

Logan folds in the details of Kim\u2019s working life at the girl\u2019s school \u2013 the principal and one of the teachers are friends and secondary characters in the novels \u2013 as well as her Cleveland setting, which is integrated seamlessly into the book.\u00a0 The mysterious threads Jazz pulls apart are complex and sometimes heartbreaking.<\/p>\n

Logan is a brisk storyteller, and the story moves right along, while at the same time investing the reader in\u00a0 Jazz as a person.\u00a0 She is very real on the page.\u00a0 Her questions lead her often not just to answers to her puzzle but to some truly memorable human moments between the characters.\u00a0 The central heartbreaker in this novel is Kim, who is struggling with alcoholism, and who disappears toward the end of the book.\u00a0 The resolution wraps up all the threads brilliantly, mystery and character wise. I was wiping away a tear as I closed the book, and you might be too.\u00a0 This is an extremely enjoyable and readable series.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is the third novel in Kylie Logan\u2019s Jazz Ramsey series, and a contribution to the growing number of mystery novels featuring cadaver dogs or rescue dogs.\u00a0 Books by Paula Munier, Margaret Mizushima, Diane Kelly, Spencer Quinn, Robert Crais and David Rosenfelt all celebrate dogs in differing degrees.\u00a0 Logan\u2019s is perhaps the least \u201cdoggy\u201d series, … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[567,568,127,126,125,100],"class_list":["post-4030","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-a-trail-of-lies","tag-airedales","tag-cadaver-dogs","tag-cleveland","tag-kylie-logan","tag-minotaur-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4030","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4030"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4030\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4034,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4030\/revisions\/4034"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4030"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4030"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4030"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}