The Dog Who Knew Too Much
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
The path to enlightenment is fraught with danger when Greenwich Village PI Rachel Alexander and her pit bull, Dash, investigate the death of a tai chi practitioner
Did she jump or was she pushed? Devastated by the loss of their only child, David and Marsha Jacobs hire Rachel to find out why Lisa leaped to her death from the fifth-floor window of her martial arts studio. The tai chi instructor, who was studying to be a Zen Buddhist priest, seemed to have it all: beauty, brains, a vocation she adored, a sexy lover—and her beautiful, sad-eyed Akita, who may have been the only witness to her death and is still grieving the loss of his mistress.
Refusing to believe that Lisa would abandon her beloved pet—and with only a suspicious suicide note to go on—Rachel and her canine assistant, Dash, hit the streets of downtown New York, retracing the dead woman’s steps to figure out whether she was yin to a killer’s yang.
The Dog Who Knew Too Muchis the 2nd book in the Rachel Alexander and Dash Mysteries, but you may enjoy reading the series in any order.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Benjamin's delightful follow-up to her Shamus-nominated first novel, This Dog for Hire (1996), takes PI Rachel Alexander and her beloved pit bull, Dashiell, into the quiet world of a t'ai chi chuan dojo, or school, in New York's Greenwich Village. Lisa Jacobs was the perfect daughter, an only child who, to please her parents, gave up her dream to live in China to stay in New York, where she centered her life around the dojo. Now Lisa's parents want to know why she threw herself out of a window at the school. The only lead is a terse suicide note. Hoping to learn what despair could have driven this beautiful, gentle--and by all accounts happy--woman to take her own life, Rachel poses as Lisa's cousin and moves with Dash into Lisa's apartment. Taking classes with Avi, Lisa's teacher at the dojo, she moves deeper into Lisa's life and her own study of t'ai chi--and into her investigation of Avi and the other students. After Lisa's boyfriend dies in what the police describe as an attempted mugging, Rachel discovers how hard Lisa had pursued her dreams--and just how much danger she herself has been in since her masquerade began. Benjamin's prose has the fluidity of a mastered t'ai chi form. Her characters, from the enigmatic, Zen-quoting Avi to Lisa's heartbroken parents, are vividly drawn, especially Rachel, who's an amalgam of strength and softness and who brings to mind a young, wisecracking, East Coast Kinsey Milhone.
