St. Thomas Dog Blog

I don’t know much about WWII, and even less about the American campaign in the South Pacific.  I learned a lot, and felt it, reading about a Yorkshire Terrier.  William Wynne’s book about his dog Smoky takes you to the war with him.  He explains it so clearly, the geography of battle, the military sorties [...]

My impression after reading about Nathan Winograd is that it’s animal shelters that need redemption. He is Director of the No Kill Advocacy Center in the US and is giving a lecture and workshop at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre Apr. 14th.  I don’t get star-struck that often, but this sounds like one very impressive [...]

Lost and Found: Dogs, Cats, and Everyday Heroes at a Country Animal Shelter is a wonderful book.  Written by Elizabeth Hess, a New York City arts journalist and author of Nim Chimpsky, it details her experiences as a volunteer at the Columbia-Greene Animal Shelter near Hudson, New York.  She and her family were among the [...]

I found this book by Cynthia Baxter (Bantam 2007) in the library.  Felt in the mood for a fluffy book, but thought this might be a bit too fluffy just based on the cover and title.  Still, give it a try. Our amateur sleuth, Jessica, is a veterinarian who runs a mobile clinic on Long Island.  [...]

This is Spencer Quinn’s first in a mystery novel series featuring Chet (dog) and Bernie (human).  Set in the US Southwest, the story is told by Chet from his point of view.  Chet flunked out of K-9 police school and Bernie is barely scraping by as a private detective.  Bernie and Chet work together as [...]

1991 Atlantic Monthly Press (hb), 1993 Avon (pb) A mystery novel by Sue Henry.  It’s good.  Several murders – at first I thought she just wanted to use all the ways she’d thought of for murder in a dogteam race.  But actually all the murders are necessary for the plot line.  They’re inventive and the [...]

The Wolf in the Parlor:  How the dog came to share your brain by Jon Franklin, 2009 (hardback) Henry Holt & Co., 2010 (paperback) St. Martin’s Griffin. It took me a few months to read this book.  It was my ‘morning coffee’ book.  Those always are read slowly.  But I had trouble with this one.  [...]

We went to see Secretariat Thanksgiving weekend at the Elgin Mall theatre.   If you’ve seen it or haven’t yet, and want to read what I thought of it, go to my site at dorothystewart.net – I don’t think there’s any spoilers.  Although we all know what happened!

In the St. Thomas Library last week, I found a new-to-me dog mystery writer.  Carol Lea Benjamin writes a series featuring private detective Rachel Alexander and her intrepid Pit Bull partner Dashiell (as in Hammett), Dash for short.  I have so far only read The Wrong Dog which is about cloning of dogs.  The dog [...]

If you like dogs and mystery novels, or even just one or the other, have a look at J. F. Englert’s Bull Moose Dog Run series.  There are three so far; A Dog About Town (2007), A Dog Among Diplomats (2008) and A Dog At Sea (2009). The ‘sleuth’ who tells the story is Randolph, [...]

Dorothy Stewart I’m reading Michael Schaffer’s One Nation Under Dog.  Very interesting.  He talks about something I’ve thought about – the term “pet parent.”  When I first encountered this phrase, I saw it as, yes, a bit ‘politically correct’, as in it’s bad to think of yourself as an authority figure over another being.  It’s [...]