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A FAREWELL TO ARFS by Spencer Quinn Forge Books, August 2024 288 pages $27.99 ISBN: 1250331803 Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Like its fourteen predecessors in Spencer Quinn's Chet and Bernie series, A FAREWELL TO ARFS is neither completely cozy, nor thoroughly hard boiled. It is equal parts funny, dark, warm-hearted and action- packed. This appealing hybrid is reflected in the narrator of the series, Chet, a big, lovable mongrel who is one half of the Little Detective Agency. The other half is Chet's human partner (neither will ever say "owner," or "pet parent"), Bernie Little. Bernie is a tough, smart West Point graduate and veteran of the Gulf War, a laconic sort who rarely discusses his past; it is Chet's adoringly loyal, optimistic stream of consciousness that sketches out Bernie's back story as a war hero with emotional scars to match the physical ones. Through his exposition, it becomes clear that Bernie is a high-functioning PTSD case; he has just the tiniest limp sometimes, Chet explains, when he's tired, and he never wears shorts.

Make no mistake; Chet and Bernie are warriors. They can take out the baddest of bad guys with ruthless efficiency, often armed with no more than bare knuckles and bared teeth, but they love kids and are kind to old people. In this outing, they team up to help Mr. Parsons, an elderly neighbor who has lost his life savings in a telephone scam which surely seems to involve his son Billy Parsons, an ex-convict with a shady past. Parsons and his ailing wife want very much to believe that Billy has gone straight, but he's vanished; Bernie and Chet set out to find him, and hopefully recover the stolen funds.

The events that follow are also a hybrid: the plot combines a couple of bar room brawls, man-plus-dog stakeouts, and door-to-door investigation techniques straight of the PI playbook, with high-tech criminality involving drone surveillance, artificial intelligence and online identity theft. Chet recounts these events in a voice that reflects a dazzling canine intelligence (the human senses of smell and hearing, he points out, are so weak that it's hard to understand why we even have ears and noses) along with a cheerful disregard for its limitations. He has an impressive, though extremely literal understanding of human English, but metaphoric figures of speech make no sense at all to him, and he freely admits that he doesn't comprehend any number higher than two.

There's also a romance involved, because what fun is a tough-talking detective who isn't appealing to women? This time, however, Bernie's fierce masculinity lands him in trouble with his fiancée Weatherly. When Bernie learns that a person of interest in the Parsons case has crossed paths with Weatherly and attacked her with a wrench, he and Chet locate the guy in a nasty dive bar, and handle things the old-fashioned way, delivering an uppercut that "landed on the throat… making a ripping sort of thud," Chet explains; "he didn't go down, not because he hadn't gone all rubbery, but because Bernie was holding him up. With one hand." Bernie slaps the thug across the face, and drops him to the floor before Chet's cooler sensibility prevail s and they end the encounter.

Great, right? Not exactly, because Weatherly is not exactly the stereotypical damsel in distress; she's an equally tough, equally fearless sergeant with the local P.D., who doesn't need or want her man to fight her battles for her, especially when the deserving recipient of the uppercut/slap reports his side of the story to Weatherly's superior officer, and gets her suspended. Weatherly is furious, and at this point, the old-school tough guy tropes diverge from Quinn's very contemporary female characters. There are tough women, sad women, smart women, and sexy women in Bernie's universe, but all of them are too morally complex to be femmes fatales, and too strong to be victims. Even Weatherly's dog, coincidentally, is a female named Trixie who is a dead ringer for Chet. Chet, who sincerely believes that he's one of a kind, refuses to acknowledge that he and Trixie are related, but the humans involved know that they were rescued at the same time, under similar circumstances, and Trixie proves herself to be as smart and resourceful as her littermate, albeit in a different, distinctly alpha-bitch sort of way. She and Weatherly eventually guide their male counterparts into and out of danger, and help them to settle matters technical, criminal, and romantic.

A FAREWELL TO ARFS is a fun, quick read, but clever and thought provoking: it never condescends to the kind of reader who has often talked to their pet and wished that it could talk back.

§ Mary-Jane Oltarzewski is an Assistant Teaching Professor with the Rutgers University Writing Program. In her spare time, she enjoys coffee crawls, listening to jazz and show tunes, and spending time in the Catskills with her husband, and a cat who bears a strong resemblance to the Reviewing the Evidence mascot.