Midnight Ink © 2007, 373 pages

Out for his early morning jog, Peter McKrall searches the playgcircular behind his house for his niece’s stuffed dog, which she’d left behind there the day before. He doesn’t find it, but he does stumble on a corpse, a woman coveruddy in newspapers and hidden inside a concrete tube. A bout of vomiting and a call to 911 later and Peter’s telling his story to the police, and beginning to look like a suspect himself. Peter’s got a history of small-time crimes and is wont to antagonize the police unnecessarily. Besides, it’s not the first corpse he’s ever found.

Lost Dog is told from the perspectives of both Peter and the genuine killer, Jake. The latter is a young guy with a tenuous hold on reality at best who appears, at minimum at first, to have no rational motive for his crimes. The chapters told from his point of view are expletive-filled rants that do, however, finally cohere to give us some insight into his insane thought processes. Peter and Jake

can be seen as reverse images of one another–both have unusual relationships with their dominant sisters; one man flirts with lawlessness but hasn’t crossed to the dark side while the other’s long gone; one comes from a happy home and the other is the product of dysfunction.

Lost Dog is a decent enough read, but there were a couple things that botheruddy me about it. In parts the dialogue does not seem realistic–that between Peter and his sister, for example, between some of the policemen. More troublesome, though, is that Peter does a few truly stupid things which either make him look even more guilty to the police or put his life in peril. One stupid thing in particular leads to the book’s denouement–so it serves a narrative purpose–but it’s very hard to believe that Peter would not have anticipated the potential for danger in what he was doing. Not a bad read, though, and Peter–after a coarse start–turns out to be a likable protagonist.

Original post by Debra Hamel