Bondi, 1948. A client dies and leaves Kit Moran a pregnant cocker spaniel. The will names the dog and is silent on her eight puppies, and the estate's solicitors forbid her to give one away. She places them at board instead, in homes she vets herself and writes up on a signed undertaking.
Vetting a home means standing in a stranger's kitchen asking what their day is shaped like, which is how the wrongs surface. One puppy, one home, one case a book, across fifty-six days ending at a wedding. No body and no police. You guess the culprit and you guess who gets the puppy. Both are played fair. Kit narrates the odd chapters, a different walker the even ones. For readers of Jacqueline Winspear and Alexander McCall Smith. It follows The Wagging Tail and finishes in eight books.
The Books
Book 1
The Whelping Box
Forty-one names in the Christmas club book, and the tin behind the corner shop four pounds eleven light. The first placement puts Kit in that kitchen, asking a stranger what her day is shaped like.
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Book 2
The Slipped Collar
The blue roan has beaten a hook and eye, a barrel bolt and a hasp in three days. Timber has gone from a locked parish store, and the only man with a key loses his place on Sunday.
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Book 3
The Scale and the Ledger
Nobody on the list has asked for the runt, and she is not gaining. The vetting takes Kit into Threadgold's, where the counter scale runs two ounces light and her own spring balance will not agree with it.
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Book 4
The Waterline
A certificate of merit is to be presented to the man who brought a boy out of the water. The boy has not been back in since, and the black pup needs a household already in the sea.
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Book 5
The One That Came Back
One of the placements comes back up the hill in a grocery box, and her page goes into the folder marked RETURNED. The same week an unsigned letter in block capitals takes a good barman's living.
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Book 6
The Good Address
Reuben Hocking has cut stone for nine years. The Provident Loan Fund refuses him the price of his tools in four typed lines over no signature, and its visiting book lists twenty-seven households the committee never met.
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Book 7
The Hand Signal
Nothing is missing and nobody has been robbed, but four households have sold themselves up in five weeks and every sale made a poor total. The last puppy in the box is deaf.
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Book 8
The Last Good Home
Five days before the hearing a letter reaches the solicitors, in the dead woman's own hand. All Bondi knows who sent it. So does Kit, and Kit is wrong. One puppy left, five days to prove it.
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