Dixie & the Dominion: Canada, the Confederacy, and the War for the Union Adam Mayers Dixie & the Dominion is a compelling look at how the U.S. Civil War was a shared experience that shaped the futures of both Canada and the United States. The book focuses on the last year of the war, between April of 1864 and 1865. During that 12-month period, the Confederate States sent spies and saboteurs to Canada on a secret mission. These agents struck fear along the frontier and threatened to draw Canada and Great Britain into the war.
Clement's assured cozy debut introduces an appealing heroine, 32-year-old Dixie Hemingway, who's given up her stressful job as a sheriff's deputy in Sarasota, Fla., to become a professional pet sitter. When Dixie calls early one morning on her latest client, a silver-blue Abyssinian named Ghost, she finds a dead man face down in the cat bowl. The contact person (a requirement when you leave an animal with a sitting service) has no clue where Ghost's owner, gorgeous Marilee Doerring, could have gone or why her locks were changed before she left.
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.
