Another Visit to Patterson, New Jersey, with Andy Carpenter, Lawyer and Dog Lover

What is it with storms, power outages, and Andy Carpenter?

Beryl: The Rest of the Story

I wrote last week’s post during my Friday lunch hour and went home to a house without electricity. Last Saturday, I returned to Lowe’s to buy two more 5-gallon gas cans (daily gas runs were getting old) and had half a mind to buy a second generator. An older worker at Lowe’s said I didn’t need to because my 6,500-watt generator was more than enough to run all the fans, window AC, and the fridge. The wife and I cleaned the fridge and plugged it in. Within the hour, the thing was making ice. Yay! No more ice runs.

Sunday morning after church, our street and the nearby Little League ball fields were swarming with utility trucks, mainly from Oklahoma and Michigan. I spent the afternoon tying up the debris I put in piles and at 2:54, electricity was restored.

And we kept the generator on and our fingers crossed for an additional two hours.

Sunday evening, we put away the generator and all the detritus it took to power fans and ACs and TVs and just breathed a massive sigh of relief. Xfinity was also working so we were back to normal. 

It was not a pleasant week, but we made it work. All of us Houstonians did. What choice did we have? The wife made a diagram of precisely how we deployed all the cords and parts so when it happens again—and there will be a next time, and a next time—we’ll know what to do from the jump. 

Just so very happy it is over…except for losing power again this past Thursday afternoon for about two hours. With daylight fading, we started to pull everything back out and had gone as far as raising the easy-up and starting the generator when the power returned. Seriously.

Another Visit to Patterson, New Jersey

Before the storm arrived and again afterwards with my phone, I maxed out my allowable number of checked out items from the library and loaded them on my Kindle Paperwhite. You just never know what reading mood you’ll be in at any given time.

Turns out I wanted comfort reading and I turned to an author I discovered in the Christmas season of 2020: David Rosenfelt and his sarcastic lawyer, Andy Carpenter.

Andy (and David) is a dog lover and his beloved golden retriever, Tara, is with him along the way. Not in a cozy mystery way—where Tara solves the crime—but as a regular dog. In fact, it’s Andy’s love of dogs, his ownership of a rescue facility, and the fact that he has represented a dog before that gets him his latest case, as related in New Tricks, the seventh entry in the long-running series.

Waggy is a Bernese puppy and the court assigns Andy to be the guardian. You see, Waggy is the child of a champion show dog which makes him coveted in a custody battle. Why is he in this position? His owner has been murdered so Andy visits the grieving widow and notices that she and her step-son do not get along. 

No sooner does Andy visit the house and get a sense of Waggy than an explosion erupts. The mansion is destroyed, the widow is dead, and local prosecutors have a prime suspect: the son. Why? Well, he hates his step-mom, he now is in line to inherit his dad’s fortune, and he can’t really explain what he was doing the night his dad was brutally murdered. Oh, and he served in the Marines where he specialized…in explosives.

I think you can see why Andy takes a second case: defense of the son. What makes it more complicated? (mild spoiler alert) Andy and his cadre of friends and associates discover the identity of the father’s killer. But he’s winds up dead before Andy can ask more questions. Now Andy has to figure out how to prove his client’s innocence without iron-clad proof and discover why so many people are after Waggy.

Coincidentally, I read the first Andy Carpenter novel during the February 2021 freeze here in Houston. I didn’t think about it when I started New Tricks, but realized it as my 2024 No Power For a Week life went on.

What made this book extra special was Waggy. He is a Bernese mountain dog. In June, we adopted a rescue dog with Bernese in the mix. Every time Rosenfelt described Waggy’s actions, I just nodded. My Bernese mix was pretty much exactly the same.

The Andy Carpenter novels are wonderful books, filled with a wry narrator whose sarcasm can get him in trouble, but makes for a fun read (or listen). Now I’m going to have to read one without living through a natural disaster.