How to Talk to Your Dog About Murder by Emily Soderberg

The house somehow managed to fit in with the air of soullessness that marked the entire subdivision, and yet be uglier than its neighbours. Built of beige stone, it sprawled in all directions, more like a corporate campus than a personal residence, although I’d never seen a corporate building with turrets…

…A white woman in late middle age answered the door after a few seconds. If I described her outfit, you might get the wrong idea about her. She wore a pink sweatshirt, very pale blue jeans, and white sneakers, and had a white windbreaker tied around her waist… something about the absolute spotlessness of her clothes, the subtlety of her make-up, and her air of complete command meant she gave off an intimidatingly well-put together impression. Like an elementary-school principal all the kids are scared of, but out walking her dog on a Sunday.

So begins the mystery of the grieving old dog in the mansion full of rude rich people who seem to spend all their time gravitating around a kitchen island.

How to Talk to Your Dog About Murder is the debut novel by Emily Soderberg. The novel follows a very eventful fortnight in the life of Nikki Jackson-Ramanathan: struggling pet behaviourist who relies on part-time bar work and selling crafts on Etsy to make ends meet. That is until she receives a very generous offer to walk the dog of a wealthy family, who is seemingly grieving the loss of its owner. Within days of meeting the family the old woman who hired her ends up dead, and Nikki finds herself a suspect alongside the rest of the dysfunctional family.

The novel is a quirky locked-room murder mystery that doesn’t take itself too seriously. It felt very much like I was watching an episode of Monk. It also felt reminiscent of films like Knives Out, following the theme of a spoilt rich family dealing with a murder in the family home. The characters are all distinctive enough, their personalities, relationships and potential motives all casting them in ambiguous light. The peripheral characters, such as Nikki’s friend Ruby, provide some variety in locations, allowing Nikki to become a bit more well-rounded as a character. I also really liked that the book was set in St Louis, which was also the authors home town. I’d like to imagine that some of the people in the author’s neighbourhood have been included in some way.

I found Nikki at times to be a bit of an insufferable character though. It was a really interesting contrast to see how negatively she thought of her over-friendly new neighbour, McKayla, while at the same time she seemingly injected herself into the lives and home of a twice-grieving family without thinking anything else of it. I had to keep reminding myself that she’d only known the van Meer family for a few days before making a daily habit of asking intrusive questions and sneaking around the house for clues. Her obliviousness to the inappropriateness of her involvement in the case verged on the absurd. I know, suspend disbelief etc but if your grandma dies you’d probably ask the dog walker to stop coming around and walk the dog yourself?

On the same tangent I found it a bit of a stretch that she was doing a better job than the police of working the case. It just felt a bit convenient that she had a best friend with a true crime obsession, a husband that studied law, and another friend who was a practicing lawyer. I kept thinking the end of one of her internal monologues would finish with ‘and everyone clapped.’ I think this could have worked better if she had been an experienced pet psychologist and there was a lot more time and energy leaning on her relationship with animals. Like… Ace Ventura: Pet Detective meets Cracker. Given the way the mystery developed and eventually resolved I think this may have been a more gratifying way for the story to have progressed.

How to Talk to Your Dog About Murder would probably also have benefited from tightening the prose a bit. Nikki nodded at someone or something over 20 times throughout the novel, three times on one page. Nobody needs to describe that much nodding. Sentences and paragraphs were at times overwrought (both the quoted paragraphs above are twice as long in the book). Self-corrections and stream-of-consciousness writing have their place, but I feel that crime novels need to be a bit more sparse, generally.

Gripes aside, this was easy enough to read, and the revelations of the crime at the end were satisfying, it felt like all the details were there and I didn’t feel like I’d been rug pulled. As I said earlier, thematically this felt closest in style and approach to an episode of Monk. This would be a great weekend read for someone who’s into the lighter side of crime fiction.

This was a free review copy of How to Talk to Your Dog About Murder. Thanks to Crooked Lane Publishers via NetGalley for providing the opportunity to read this ahead of publication on October 21st.

How to Talk to Your Dog About Murder is available for pre-order from UK Bookshop.org. UK Bookshop donate 30% of the cover price to an independent bookshop of your choice, or 10% to an earnings pool that is distributed across participating bookshops each month.