A former sheriff's deputy in Sarasota, Fla., Dixie Hemingway now earns a living as a pet sitter, a career that once again turns perilous when her charge, a dachshund, digs up a dead body at the start of Clement's fast-paced sophomore effort (after 2005's Curiosity Killed the Cat Sitter). Dixie identifies the victim as Conrad Ferrelli, whose Doberman pinscher she once walked. A wealthy, eccentric son of a famous Ringling Brothers clown, Conrad and his wife, Stevie, were funding the creation of a retirement home for circus performers.
In the third Dixie Hemingway mystery (after 2007's Duplicity Dogged the Dachshund), Clement blends elements of cozy and thriller to produce an unusual and enjoyable hybrid. Pet-sitter Dixie, a former sheriff's deputy on leave after the death of her husband and daughter, finds a corpse in the gatehouse of a mansion, but leaves the body for someone else to find. Traumatized by having killed someone recently, Dixie wants nothing to do with homicide, but fate decrees otherwise.
Ex-deputy Dixie Hemingway still mourns the loss of her young daughter and cop husband in a freak accident three years earlier, but takes solace in her pet-sitting job in Siesta Key, Fla., in Clement's thoughtful and at times somber fourth animal-themed cozy (after 2008s Even Cat Sitters Get the Blues). Eager for friendship, Dixie forms an immediate bond with an attractive new neighbor, Laura Halston, who has a cat named Leo. When someone stabs Laura to death in the shower, Dixie suspects Lauras soon-to-be ex-husband, a sadistic surgeon skilled with a scalpel.
Curiosity is always a killer for former police officer Dixie Hemingway. Even a trip to pick up her parrot at the veterinarian’s office is bound to turn up something…curious…and the teenager Dixie meets in the waiting room is no exception. “Jaz,” as she calls herself, is inconsolable after her stepfather ran over a rabbit with his car. Really? Dixie’s animal-like instinct tells her that something’s not quite right about this Jaz—and she’s going to make it her purrsonal business to find out more.
Dixie, no relation to you-know-who, is helping an injured and cantankerous man take care of Cheddar, his orange shorthair cat. Soon Dixie finds herself totally smitten with the man's adorable infant great-granddaughter. But the baby's naive young mother has enough knowledge about certain powerful local big-money honchos to send them to prison for life, and they are willing to do anything, even kill her baby, to shut her up.
