Bondi, 1947. The war is over, but its quiet fills every room of the house Kit Moran once shared with her husband. She reopens his shuttered vet surgery as The Wagging Tail, a dog-walking round for a seaside suburb still learning how to breathe again, and discovers that dogs notice what people work hard to hide.
Each book brings a new walker to the round, a young woman carrying her own war, and each finds a quiet romance along with the work. The cases are gentle by design: no body, no gunshots, no nightmares, just small wrongs followed patiently to the truth. Running underneath it all is Kit's own slow thaw. For readers of Jacqueline Winspear and Rhys Bowen who would like a wagging tail beside them.
The Books
Book 1
The Missing Lead
Argos the Border Collie cannot settle. He keeps working at a client's hedge, and what he digs out of it is glass and copper, buried deliberately. Next door, a neighbour watches the fence line all morning.
Not yet on sale
Book 2
The Lead and the Loop
Meat left near a fence line, discoloured in a way that is not rot. Kit's new walker found it, and she is carrying a folded letter of her own that her father must never see.
Not yet on sale
Book 3
The Morning Round
An open window on Hastings Parade three mornings running, an empty kennel, a red ball lying where the dog dropped it. By afternoon the police are at the gate and a note has come.
Not yet on sale
Book 4
The Back Gate Key
The jamb is splintered and nothing has been taken, which means whoever forced that door was looking for something and did not find it. Kit sets her newest walker to sorting her husband's old patient cards.
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Book 5
The Collar and the Clip
Fresh scratches on the brass of her husband's drug cabinet, and the door no longer sits flush. Up the headland road a monkey screeches behind a hedge, and someone inside that house is speaking German to it.
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Book 6
The Empty Run
A retired navy man wants his kelpie walked. His yard is swept shipshape, his hedge trimmed level, and in one corner a green tarpaulin has slipped off a load that was meant to stay covered.
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Book 7
The Last Walk Home
Duchess will not leave the room where her mistress died. The doctor has written heart, natural, nothing to query. But every curtain in that house was drawn at ten in the morning, and Kit's newest walker noticed.
Not yet on sale
Book 8
The Whole Pack
A floorboard in the back room has been levered up and set down again, and nothing beneath it is missing. That same morning a girl of eighteen arrives at the door with one suitcase and nowhere else to go.
Not yet on sale
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