Chet & Bernie Series

It doesn’t matter if you like dogs. Or private detectives. Or murder mysteries. If you like laughter, sarcastic humor, and listening to a dog’s thoughts, you’ll like Spencer Quinn’s series of Chet & Bernie mysteries.

The Little Detective Agency is owned by Bernie Little and run by Chet, Bernie’s dog sidekick.  Well, Chet thinks he’s running the place, since he constantly worries about Bernie losing the check a client gave them, or agreeing to work for someone for free or at a discount.

The books in the series are narrated by Chet, so you’ll find out exactly what your dog — and many other dogs — are thinking when humans say and do weird things. Chet doesn’t understand when Bernie says strange things like “We hit that on the nose.” Chet doesn’t get where noses even came into the conversation. The things Bernie and others say that are completely misunderstood by Chets are hilarious.

Chet can find Cheetos in the craziest places, he can sniff out any dropped piece of food within 20 yards, and he can spot a bad guy within 40 yards. Each book in the series is an assignment to find a murderer, find a missing person, or rescue an elephant or anyone needing help. They hate divorce cases, so they try to avoid them completely.

The first book in the series is “Dog On It.” Yes, each title is a play on words for something else. Examples: “Thereby Hangs a Tail,” “To Fetch a Thief,” “The Sound and the Furry,” “A Fistful of Collars” — and it continues. You should know, if the titles of the books make you smile, you’ll be laughing out loud when you read them.

There’s a murder or two involved in each book, so there’s always something interesting going on. Chet is great at tracking who needs to be saved, or tracking the bad person who has hurt innocents. He also is great at taking down the bad person — either by a tackle on the run, or grabbing a pant’s leg (with a leg inside it). Bernie is an excellent detective, but since Chet is telling the story, Bernie uses all the human methods to find the bad people, then Chet does a lot of the hard work.

You don’t have to read the series in order. I’ve been checking them out of the library, and the next one in the series isn’t always available to grab. I just go with what I can check out immediately, then wait for the others to come available. They are all entertaining, so you can’t go wrong.