A Dog Among Diplomats
by J. F. Englert
Summary
He reads Proust. Surfs the net. Is the soul of diplomacy.
And when it comes to solving crime,
Randolph is the dog for the job.
Murder has come to Manhattan’s East Village. And when detectives call twenty-something artist Harry to the scene, his Labrador, Randolph, instantly smells a rat. Why? Because Harry’s missing almost-fiancée—and Randolph’s beloved mistress—has been implicated in the murder, which has ties to the U.N. While Harry looks to the spirit world for answers, careening between terror and wild hope that Imogen is alive, Randolph goes into detective mode, using his superior Lab brain—2.3 pounds of smoothly functioning gray matter—to surf the Net, track down clues, and even land a job as a “therapy” dog to a depressed diplomat. Suddenly the brainy, book-loving Lab has done the impossible: he’s penetrated the shadowy corridors of the U.N. (which boasts the most vicious, backbiting dog run in the city) in search of a killer. Now it will take all of Randolph’s cunning to protect Harry, clear Imogen’s name, solve the crime—and stay alive long enough to enjoy his upcoming birthday.
Excerpt
THE YOUNG MAN AND HIS PARACHUTE
A PHOTOGRAPH OPENS OLD WOUNDS
It’s not every day that a young man clad only in boxer shorts embossed with red hearts dies beneath an opened parachute in a small third-floor room in one of New York’s last boardinghouses. It’s even rarer that a visual artist, the owner of a Labrador retriever equipped with a generous belly, a fine mind and an admirable temperament, is called to the scene by the police department before the body is even cold. Yet this is exactly what happened just after ten p.m. on a recent mild March night.
I was sitting on my haunches in our cozy apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, looking into the middle distance and allowing a mother lode of Chinese spareribs to settle pleasantly in my gullet. I felt a postdinner nap coming on and was not planning to resist (in this hectic world it is often a struggle to get my twelve-hour sleep quota). Harry, my twenty-something owner, was beginning the third hour of a documentary on the life of Vincent van Gogh, narrated, it seemed, by a narcoleptic whose voice rose at all the wrong moments, as if he had just been poked awake again in the sound booth.
Then the phone rang. My owner had already taken me for my evening Numbers 1 and 2 (shortchanging himself van Gogh’s contentious roommateship with Gauguin at Arles) and was loath to be roused from Grandfather Oswald’s La-Z-Boy for anything short of an evacuation of Manhattan for the apocalypse. He let the machine pick up, and Imogen’s voice filled our living room.
“Leave a message after the beep,” she said before trailing off into an uncertain whisper. “Harry, is it a beep?”
The mild but decisive voice of the caller came next.
“Harry, it’s Detective Davis. If you’re there, pick up. It’s important. It involves . . . her.”
Harry flew out of his La-Z-Boy recliner and grabbed the phone. My nose could detect the strong waves of hope, excitement and possibility that my owner shed. I wondered if Detective Peter Davis, the lead investigator in Imogen’s case, had a breakthrough to report. Our lovely Imogen, who had rescued me from the pet-store clods and then included Harry in our domestic arrangements, had disappeared over a year before without a word or lead—foul play suspected. I had not yet informed Harry, but I had spotted her once again disappearing into a subway tunnel after the successful—if brutal—conclusion to our last mystery. That investigation had pushed both Harry and me to great extremes of endurance and ingenuity, and the end found us on the verge of an even larger mystery, which promised to span the globe in a conspiratorial and high-stakes web before it brought some resolution to our loss of Imogen. Detective Davis’s phone call was the beginning of what would prove to be Act II.
Excerpted from A Dog Among Diplomats by J.F. Englert. Copyright © 2008 by J. F. Englert. Excerpted by permission of Dell, a division of Random House, Inc.
Author's Biography
J.F. Englert, a writer of fiction and nonfiction for both book and screen, lives in Manhattan with his wife, P. Englert, daughter, C. Englert, and dog, R. Englert.