Barking Dogs
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
The network news crew flying out from Los Angeles to cover a forest fire in Idaho believe themselves entitled to danger pay. The blaze has completely destroyed a rural religious community and all its inhabitants and is still raging—but that’s not the reason they feel at risk.
The danger comes from their on-screen reporter—beautiful, sexy, and malignantly ambitious Vicki Garcia. When Vicki turns her wiles on a man who has something she wants—whether an extra minute on camera or a helicopter ride to the off-limits scene of the tragedy—she gets it. Sometimes it provides great coverage; but it can also get one or more of her victims incarcerated, incapacitated, or incinerated. Particularly at peril is the crew’s smitten field producer, Kevin Manwaring, whom Vicki keeps on edge with unspoken—and unfulfilled—promises of delights to come.
The small Idaho town, formerly occupied by the gentle people who perished in the conflagration, is coveted by a mining company. The story seems simple enough—until the television technicians discover a severely wounded dog with a bullet in its chest. As the crew investigates the true origin of the fire, they become the prey of a clever killer.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A writer who is alternately warm and cynical, but always knowing, Irvine departs from his series of Mormon mystery adventures featuring Moroni Traveler ( The Great Reminder , etc.) to introduce a new sleuthing team: maverick television producer Kevin Manwaring and tough reporter Vicki Garcia. The Latter Day Saints still haunt the storyline as the pair investigates an Idaho fire that wiped out the members of a Mormon offshoot group. The eyes of Kevin's bosses dilate with visions of big ratings after the discovery of charred bodies of children, but Kevin senses more. Many people were angry with the sect: the fire chief lost his wife to a cult member, and residents of the nearby town of Defiance resented the group's refusal to let a software company build a plant on its land or to sell badly needed water rights to the town. The clues are slight: a dog barking on a videotape, a drunken poet's rantings and Manwaring's instincts, which are not diminished by such distractions as the chaste (though regularly propositioned) Vicki, the charms of a pretty local animal doctor or his dreadful mother. Irvine, a former TV producer, gives his assorted media types nasty hearts and souls. Even the gutsy, gifted Kevin occasionally succumbs to sexist cretinism; only Vicki comes across as genuinely nice. Both are very welcome on the scene.
