Dog Day Afternoon (A Dublin Story of a Kick-Ass Dog, The Dublin Trilogy Deluxe Part One, Book Three) by Caimh McDonnell

⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

A good, quick read. Dog Day Afternoon follows our favourite Irish Detective Sergeant, Bunny McGarry, as he searches for a corpse to take the place of a police dog, condemned to death for an attack that was beyond her control.

If Bunny is to save Maggie, the police dog, he’ll need an agreeable vet and a doppelgänger dead dog pronto. But will he find a body in time? And even if he does, will anyone believe it’s really Maggie?

Great fun. Maggie is a great character. It can be difficult to understand the personality traits of a non-speaking character, but she’s very well-written and the imagery and humour of the author’s other works are evident in this short story. I loved it. Aside from Maggie, I really liked put-upon, last-minute veterinarian, Noreen:

“She really had tried to like people, but it was very hard to based on the available evidence – war, famine and the films of Adam Sandler. Animals, on the other hand, were infinitely more lovable. In fact, their only downside was that they were invariably owned by people. It was the Peter principle on a massive evolutionary scale. Humanity had been promoted to the position of dominant species, a role they managed with utter incompetency.
“Take this specimen, for example; standing on the opposite side of the counter in a black sheepskin coat, which smelled like it hadn’t been cleaned since the sheep had worn it. His large bulbous face was a shade of red only meant for beetroot and heart attacks, and a lazy left eye only added to the impression of him being unhinged. To be fair, in other circumstances, he’d probably have just looked intense as opposed to deranged, but those circumstances would’ve involved him not bursting into her surgery demanding a dead dog.”
54% in, Dog Day Afternoon, The Dublin Trilogy Deluxe Part One, Book Three) by Caimh McDonnell