Customer Reviews

Doggone (Animal Instinct Mysteries, No. 2)

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

This is a great follow-up to Catnapped! Strong story with continued building of the characters underpinned by the authors wonderfully pacy writing style (and brilliant sense of humour) Put a few hours aside, head to your local Starbucks, order a skinny hot chocolate with two pumps of Peppermint (and whipped cream), sit back, relax and read! A great book!

and until the very end, I was ready to blame myself (since I have been somewhat distracted). Then I realized Ms. Herkert wrote this title as if she were writing a legal document (had I not been so distracted I would have recognized it for what it was immediately as I worked in the biggie law firms in Manhattan)and we should all be aware that legalese is most unpleasant on any sheet of paper..

Ms. Klausner's reviews have for some time been less than forthcoming and for a "professional" I have to say I find it most disconcerting, to the point where I actually sent her an email many many years ago, stressing how unreliable her "opinions" had become to me. She never responded..LOL

I purchased Doggone as soon as it hit the shelves based on how much I enjoyed Catnapped....oh well, that will be the last I read of Herkert's titles....The reviewer before me was much more accurate in assessing this book to the point where I cannot add much more than this....I agree with all the points made in that review....if read it you must, try saving some moolah and borrow it from your local library.

Oh, and I STILL haven't read Ms. Klausner's review but I could not avoid seeing her famous (or should I say infamous) 5-stars near her name...so very meaningless.

I am an avid reader of cozy mysteries.
I read for the pure enjoyment a book can bring me.
Sometimes reading is the only thing that keeps me going.
I love reading, period!
Recently, on a forum here,wonderful people gave me tons of mystery books to add to my book list. "Doggone", and "Catnapped", were two of them. I really enjoyed the characters, Sara and Connor.
They made me laugh and at their antics, and enjoy a well written mystery.
Plus, having a female detective, who follows her instincts,
no matter what, is my kind of heroine.

Ratings from earlier Amazon reviewers of this book are all over the place.

Having read Gabriella Herkert's "Doggone," I can see why. There are odd little lapses of continuity--and one or two even odder ones of logic. Characterization is strictly by the numbers and except for an occasional flash of liveliness from the narrator-heroine, completely flat.

"Doggone" is a mystery tale written and published in the era of chic-lit, so it offers as much romantic wish-fulfillment as it does mystery-cracking. The hero is Prince Charming, 21st Century style: a hunk, a naval officer, a gentleman (in public, anyway), rich as Croesus, physically formidable and not especially bright. The hero (for want of a better term for the narrator-heroine's new husband) also comes equipped with a feisty left-wing granny, a society matriarch mother, a rather battered and bruised--but ultimately redeemable--sister, a smart-aleck kid brother and, oh yeah, a father who happens to be an admiral. The heroine is rather taken by the physicality of her new husband, who is still in many ways a stranger to her, and this manifests itself in repeated passages of fairly mild eroticism--which some readers apparently regard as not mild enough and too often repeated.

What are the merits of "Doggone," simply as a mystery novel? Is the plot surprising in any way? No. Or especially clever? No. Is the final resolution apparent to and easily predictable by a reader with a speck of common sense? Yes. Is there one convincing detail anywhere in the book? No. Is there a believable sequence, chapter, paragraph, sentence from the first page of "Doggone" to the last? No.

After all this, you may well be asking why on earth I am assigning four stars to "Doggone"? The answer is a very simple one: the book is an absolute hoot! Herkert is one of those remarkably rare writers who handles words in such a way that the book reads at a breakneck pace. Now, I absolutely am not saying that "Doggone" is a so-called "fast read," a term that I always regard as the kiss of death. No, I am saying that Ms. Herket's book zooms along at a pace that approaches that of that fleetest-footed of writers, Earle Stanley Gardner in his tales of Perry Mason.

More than that, while Ms. Herkert may have intended to foist upon the reading public a 21st Century chic-lit mystery novel, she has consciously or otherwise done something much more impressive. She has given us what amounts to a novelization of the screenplay of a comedy-mystery movie from the mid-1930s. Think of this book upon a screen in glorious black and white. If Paramount pictures has expensively produced it, the movie "Doggone" has either Barbara Stanwick or Roz Russell for its heroine and her new (clueless) hubby is Henry Fonda. Franchot Tone is the kid brother. Whats'ername, the girl who played Jane in the Weissmuller Tarzan pictures, is the sister. Mary Boland is the mother and a couple of wonderful character actors whose names nobody ever remembers are the granny and the admiral. If the film is produced by Columbia on poverty row, the heroine is the young, sexy, sharp-as-a-tack Lucille Ball, Randolph Scott is the husband and Frankie Darrow is the kid brother.

Either way, it's a great picture and an enjoyable book. I look forward to the third volume of the series, even as I begin my search for a copy of the first.

Four glossy stars

The plot is so confusing I lost track of John and Charles and finally Edward. The main theme of this book is sex and the mystery is completely secondary. The dog named Pavarotti is almost not there and appears so infrequently that the title seems a misnomer. The writing style is not smooth...the sexual innuendo runs constantly through every thought and conversation which makes for choppy reading. I lost track of threads so many times I gave up and just plowed on through to the unsatisfactory conclusion. It is not a horrible book, but not too good. I didn't read her first in her pet series, but I don't think I'll bother unless someone gives to me.

I bought this book based on the fact that I had enjoyed the first book, Catnapped. The premise was good, a quickie marriage to a Navy SEAL. However, in this book, the premise wore thin quickly. The mystery portion of the story was convoluted to the point that I did not even realize what the mystery was. And, as another reviewer has pointed out, the entire book revolved around Sara and Conner's sex life. While I don't mind a little romance, or romantic tension, this was very distracting and did little to further the mystery, or its solution. In fact, in the end, I don't know if there really was a solution to the actual mystery that we were set out to solve at the beginning of the book.

Like the other reviewer, I probably will just borrow the next book from the library and will not continue with the series unless the sex is put in the back seat and the mystery given more page time, and is a much clearer mystery and solution. The mystery is what I happen to read a cozy mystery series for, not for the character's sexual escapades.

If I hadn't been out of the country stuck with only this book, I probably would have given up. I'm glad I stuck it out because, finally, after 70 pages, I get it. The story is still a bit convoluted at this point, and has not created any interest in who committed the murder or why, but the core characters are developed and I am enjoying the moxy and humor of the protagonist, Sara. It may take me a while to finish. This will be a read in between other books. It's not good enough to stick with, but it has merit. I must say that I am on page 110 and the dog, so prominently featured in the title and the back cover blurb has only been sighted twice. I gave the book only three stars because for more stars it should be better if I'm a third of the way through. I'll update my comment if my opinion changes radically.

I bought this book based on how much I loved the first one...Catnapped.....and for the most part I liked it but whoever edited this book prior to it's printing must have been on drugs because there are a lot of misspelled words and there are two places where the book does not even make sense. The first comes when you're reading along and they start talking about all this background stuff like they mentioned it earlier. I started flipping back pages to see what I missed.....and I didn't miss anything....it just comes out of the blue. Later in the book the main character is walking down the street with her husband and gets in their car...suddenly the dog is in the car with them but you never know how the dog got there. You read on and they get where they are going and the book read like the dog was never in the car but comes strolling up to them while they are at the dog owner's apartment.....then they put the dog in the car and go home. What the heck? If it was a book I'd written I'd be angry that they were publishing it with errors. There is another book in this series coming out this year and I'll read it just to see if this is a fluke.....

I loved this book and couldn't put it down. Great mystery were you really have to think at times and I really like a book like this. I read it in less then 24 hours. I look forward to her newest book, Horsewhipped.

I am an avid reader (75-100 novels per year) that will continue reading a book until the end no matter how bad the book. I have struggled to read 200 pages of Doggone but I cannot read another page. This book is confusing and hard to follow. There is a significant amount of slang and innuendos in the book that are difficult to decipher. This will be the last Gabriella Herkert book for me.