The eighth entry of P.C. Hatter’s Kaiser Wrench series opens with the first-person narrator tiger detective’s reunion with an old flame, after which he kills the thugs who hold her hostage. Kaiser also has a new District Attorney to answer to, a Philippine eagle named Edmund Flagg, not to mention a boxer inspector named Allen Tremaine. Playing a significant role in the story as well is a poodle named Lacie Davis, whose stepfather, Samson Barns, is in the primaries for Governor of New York, having his eye on the American presidency, as well, though luckily, the novella isn’t ideologically-sensitive at all.
Kaiser tries to get information on Barns and his murdered wife Mary Davis, whom an individual known as the Worm murdered. The tiger meets various incarcerated criminals in his search for the Worm, with the fate of a copperhead named Arnold Cummings, believed to be deceased, serving as a decent driving factor to read the book to the end. A fire incinerates the Barns family’s summer home, and Kaiser with the aforementioned returning old flame finds himself held hostage, although he does manage to escape captivity. The book ends with a drive upstate and revelation on who the Worm is.
All in all, this was an okay quick read with a decent mystery and good animal characters, although one can certainly find it difficult to keep track of the species of the various dramatis personae, and a list of the named luminaries in the novella preceding the primary text would have definitely been welcome. The names of the characters also don’t indicate their species, for instance with Leo Granger having possibly been a better name for a lion than a beaver. There are also more than a handful errors in spelling and punctuation that the book’s editor, if there were indeed one, overlooked, and while the novella could have been better, it definitely wasn’t a total waste of time.
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