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 Six O'Clock Leads and finishes in eight books.
The Books
Book 1
The Whelping Box
The Christmas club tin at Ockenden's has come up short of the book four Fridays running, and Cissy says the figure out loud. Forty-one households pay into that tin, and Kit's first placement is behind one of their doors.
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Book 2
The Slipped Collar
A hook and eye, a barrel bolt, a hasp: the blue roan has beaten all three in three days. Timber has gone from a padlocked parish store, and the committee means to settle it quietly on Sunday.
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Book 3
The Scale and the Ledger
Nobody on the waiting list has asked for a runt, and the smallest pup is two ounces down in three days. The one man who can help writes the name of the scale beside every figure he takes.
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Book 4
The Waterline
The black pup wants the sea before he wants breakfast, so his household must already be in it. And Kit has been put down for a few words at Friday's certificate presentation, about a morning she did not see.
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Book 5
The One That Came Back
A puppy comes back. Her page goes into the folder with one word written under the three signatures, and the same week a barman of fourteen years is stood down over a letter the licensee will not show.
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Book 6
The Good Address
The Bondi Provident Loan Fund wants the Simpson money and the Harrington name, and Bee carries both onto its committee. Its register runs eleven years, and not one pound of it has reached Wellington Street.
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Book 7
The Hand Signal
Kit writes one word on the eighth line of the schedule, Deaf, and knows exactly how a kitchen will read it. Meanwhile Bondi is selling itself up house by house, and Elsie's own sale is Wednesday.
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Book 8
The Last Good Home
The surgery is going into crates, and the round-book lies open at the last date Kit will ever write in it. One puppy left, five days to the hearing, and seven households she has signed for and cannot warn.
Not yet on sale
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