Review: Excellent Introduction to the Doan & Carstairs duo
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 08 25, 2011
This is a little more than a short story, probably more like a novella.  It's an excellent introduction to the detective duo of Doan (human) and Carstairs (canine).  As others have said, there's an undercurrent of very sly, dry, humor in this story that is unusual for the time period in which it was written (40's) and genre (fairly hard-boiled).  I can just picture the author typing away seriously, but with a manic gleam of amusement in his eyes as he paints verbal pictures of Carstairs.The story itself is fairly conventional (aside from Carstairs) but has some strong points.  I think it's quite typical of the genre in that the detective does most of the 'detecting' in his head, and then explains his thought process at the denoument, rather than as things go along.Recommended!Note on Kindle formatting:  Only OK.  There were quite a few typos (transposed letters) and a few other oddities.  Once in a while there was a paragraph break missing in a converstation, making it a bit hard to determine who-said-what.  However, the formatting issues really didn't detract from reading, and once I realized what they were, I didn't let them bother me.