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Let Loose the Dogs : A Detective William Murdoch Mystery

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This is the fourth book featuring Acting Detective William Murdoch of the Victorian Toronto police. To reverse a famous line from Sherlock Holmes, it involves the curious incident of the dogs which did do something in the night ...

The Detective Murdoch series to date consists of

1) Except the Dying

2) Under the Dragon's Tail

3) Poor Tom is Cold

4) This book, "Let Loose the Dogs"

5) Night's Child (Murdoch Mysteries)

6) Vices of My Blood

7) A Journeyman to Grief (Murdoch Mysteries)

The setting for these books is a beautifully recreated and painstakingly researched picture of Victorian Toronto. The series includes some descriptions of real buildings and practices as they existed at the time along with one or two real historical characters. For example, the prison Warden in this book, J. M. Massie is a real historical figure who actually expressed in his surviving writings some of the opinions which the author has him say in this book. Massie really was Warden of one of Toronto's prisons at the time of the story, although for reasons explained in an author's note to this book she has translated him from a prison which no longer survives to one which does.

In this story, Detective Murdoch's private and professional lives collide as two different aspects of his past resurface in tragic circumstances.

The prologue, in August 1895, describes a dog contest, and the description is probably not one for the squeamish (though it is the sort of fight in which dogs compete on the ability to kill rats rather than being turned against each other). The owner of one of the participating dogs becomes convinced that his opponents are cheating, and storms out in a drunken rage, after which he claims to have fallen and hit his head on the way home, and remembers nothing else.

The person who was accused of cheating was murdered that evening, and his accuser becomes the accused.

As the main action of the story begins in December 1895, Detective Murdoch is called to a convent to visit his dying sister: the visit brings back memories of cruelties which drover her to the convent and other members of their family to the grave. He has scarcely returned when he receives an appeal for help from the perpetrator of those cruelties. Is the appeal he has received a desperate last throw from a villain who is finally facing justice - or a genuine plea for justice and redemption?