Berne, Suzanne The Dogs of Littlefield [EPUB]

As the man and his dog sprinted away — the greyhound really was impressively fast — I resumed reading. By now it was clear that, as with her previous novels, Berne was not interested in following the dictates of a conventional mystery. (“A clue, Mom?” mocks a teenage boy when his mother casts herself as amateur sleuth, “What are you, Sherlock Holmes?”) The perpetrator’s identity matters less than the crime’s psychological ramifications, its “assault” on the “equilibrium” of the supposedly placid Littlefield. One character calls the poisonings a “domestic fear campaign.” Another argues that “the dogs are a symptom of a more systemic problem” with the town’s governance. The sociologist Dr. Watkins concludes that Littlefield’s reaction to the incidents has revealed the fundamental unhappiness of its supposedly happy, and privileged, population:

Discovering the villain’s motive and method will therefore not restore order to the community. Because there is something endemically infecting the town psyche, the resolution to the mystery cannot dispel the lingering unease in Littlefield, “strangely infatuated with the idea of menace” as it is.

But I was getting ahead of myself. I had not even reached the end of the novel yet. My basset, perhaps sensing my desire to finish the captivating book, brusquely yanked me over to a bench. Witnessing this, a smug park-goer saw fit to make the following observation.

“You’re not walking your dog. Your dog’s walking you!”

Ha, ha, yes, well put. I met the man’s aperçu with a self-deprecating laugh, all the while wishing he would walk himself straight into a ditch.

I sat down to read the last pages of The Dogs of Littlefield, the comic passages becoming less frequent as the novel dissected the ineradicable unhappiness of the aptly named Downing family.