Carol Lea Benjamin

IN A NUTSHELL
A disappointing, depressing, dismal novel that tried and failed to make Rachel Alexander into the kind of detective who can be effective at solving murders amongst the transgender prostitutes and organised crime, covert drugs supply chains of Manhattan's Meatpacking District. The violently abusive environment was displayed in all its despair and pain, but Rachel was as out of place there as a hog roast at a Bar Mitzvah. I believed the environment. I didn't believe in her ability show more to survive it.

Having enjoyed the first three Rachel Alexander & Dash novels, I went into 'The Long Good Boy' expecting to see Rachel doing her usual thing of using her background to blend into an environment, learn about the people, and sniff out the murderer, sometimes by leveraging her dog training knowledge, sometimes just relying on her insight, empathy and sense of humour.

It seemed to me that Carol Lea Benjamin was trying to do something different in this novel. She'd obviously researched the challenges faced by trans sexworkers in the Manhattan Meatpacking District. She succeeded in showing how desperate their lives are, the risks that they're forced to take as they live their nocturnal lives, working with abusive pimps, predatory cops, and potentially violent customers who see the prostitutes only as meat.

She also came up with a decent murder mystery, involving the death of a meatpacking manager and a prostitute.

The problem was that Rachel Alexander was so far out of her depth that just by being there, she put herself, her dog, and the people who hired her at risk. The lowest point of the book for me was watching Rachel come up with an elaborate plan to train a dog to open a window to give her access to a building, forgetting that the window was so high up she'd have to swing into it and forgetting to plan a way out once she was inside. This was too much to swallow. It was made worse when, later in the book, she gained access to the same place simply by getting someone to provide a distraction.

I was disappointed by this book. It wasn't the kind of book I'd been expecting to read. It was darker, grimmer, and more violent. Yet it didn't quite succeed in being a hardboiled crime novel because Rachel Alexander just isn't tough enough or skilled enough to function in that environment. show less

I read and enjoyed the first Rachel Alexander and Dash Mystery, ‘This Dog For Hire’(1996) six years ago. I’d meant to carry on with the series, but for some obscure reason, the rest of the series wasn’t available in the UK as an audiobook. I picked up 'The Dog Who Knew Too Much' (1997) when it was released in the UK as an audiobook in 2025. I'm glad I did. It was great entertainment. Dina Pearlman was the perfect narrator for this, and she performed it with gusto.

Although this might show more appear to be a cosy mystery (Cute title, dog trainer turned unlicensed PI as the heroine, Pit Bull called Dashiell as her 'partner'), 'The Dog Who Knew Too Much' doesn't set out to amuse or even to make the reader comfortable. The death at the centre of the story is a tragedy for everybody touched by it. Their grief, guilt and anger are real and powerful.

The people in the story are vividly drawn. The dialogue felt authentic, especially when Rachel was meeting with David and Marsha Jacobs, which, given that they were the parents of the young woman who may or may not have committed suicide, was heart-wrenching.

The suspect pool, assuming a crime had been committed, was small, but the characters were diverse, and more than one of them had something to conceal.

The practice of Tai Chi was so well described that it made me want to seek out a class so I could learn to slip into that disciplined meditation on motion.

What I liked most about the book was the journey it took Rachel on. She chooses to investigate the death by literally living in the dead woman's shoes. She lives in her condo, wears her clothes and attends her Tai Chi studio. As she does this, she reflects on her own experience of grief, loss and betrayal. I learned as much about Rachel as I did about the people she was investigating.

The mystery was a good one, but it's the people whom I'll remember. show less

I liked "This Dog For Hire". It kept me entertained from beginning to end. It also kept refusing to be the easy-to-classify book I thought I'd bought.


I was expecting a cosy mystery with a sassy woman PI accompanied by a cute-but-muscular dog that saves the day. It sort of is that, but it mostly isn't.


Rachel Alexander is more spiky than sassy. She's a hard-bitten New Yorker who's too tough to intimidate or to bullshit. She's a thirty-eight-year-old, recently divorced woman who gave up her show more dog training business when she married and took up the PI business when she divorced, mostly because her family thought it was a terrible idea. Dash, her pitbull who she rescued (stole) as a puppy from punks who wanted to train him to fight, is cute but muscular but he's sidelined for most of the book.


The plot is clever, with a few unexpected but reasonable twists in it. Most of the action is set at the Westminster Kennel Club Show in Maddison Garden and it's clear that this is a world that Carol Lea Benjamin understands very well. Seen through Rachel Alexander's unforgiving and perceptive eyes, the fiercely competitive nature of the show and the idiosyncrasies of its participants are thrown into vivid relief.


The story is a lot darker and more emotionally intense than I'd expect a cozy mystery to be. This isn't a tidy middle-class white-picket-fence kind of tale. We're taken amongst New York's homeless and dying and we're shown the taken-for-granted gay-bashing. A childhood of abuse is a key plot element. It's revealed with skill and told with a compassionate honesty that makes it painful to read.


Once I scrubbed my pre-conceptions and took the book on its own terms, I found myself enjoying being in Rachel Alexander's often abrasive company, partly because the traumas she was dealing with were real and important and not just devices needed to enable neat plot twists.


"This Dog For Hire" came out in 1997 and is the first of nine books in the series, that last being published in 2006. I'm looking forward to reading the next one "The Dog Who Knew Too Much" when it comes out as an audiobook.


I listened to the audiobook version of "This Dog For Hire" which was released in November 2019. It's narrated by Dina Pearlman who is the perfect choice for this series. show less

This is a murder mystery with a very entertaining lady detective Rachel Alexander and her sidekick Pit Bull Dash (Dashiell). When she first lays eyes on the person who hires her to solve a murder, she describes him as ‘with a walk that announced his sexual orientation.’ The gay aspects of the book are done well for dramatic effect. The police are doing little to solve the murder as they are treating it as a gay bashing. The book was published in 1997 and I think at that time it was more show more of a dramatic statement instead of now where every movie and TV show is required to have at least one gay person represented.

At one point the gallery owner is hyping the work of the dead artist’s work in this way:

“It was his way of expressing not only his own alienation and the alienation all gay men feel, but a far larger issue, the alienation of the nineties, the understanding that we never really know each other, and the question of whether or not many of us care for each other.”

In addition to the murder, we are told that “Margritte is missing.” A basenji who is a valuable AKC champion. The author uses the tie from Margritte to bring in details of the Westminster dog show and use that venue with great effect. Margritte is nicely described in this paragraph:

He was immaculately clean, almost sparkling, a little foxy-faced boy with small rounded-at-the-top triangular ears and dark, alert eyes. He was a ruddy chestnut brown with white points on his face, chest, paws, and tail, a handsome, elegant, and with an uncanny presence, especially considering he weighed not much more than twenty pounds. He was clearly the kind of dog judges say “asks to win,” the kind of creature you somehow find yourself drawn to look at, no matter how many other dogs are around. It was no surprise at all that he was so successful in the show ring.

Dash has a good role in the book and is not overplayed with no anthropomorphism. Here is one passage I enjoyed:

“Does Dashiell actually… do things, I mean, besides protecting you?”
I looked down at my dog. The top of his head had been slimed by one of the other dogs. His big meaty mouth was agape and panting, a loop of drool draped delicately over his worm-colored lower lip. And he was covered in dirt.
“You thought he was just a pretty face?”

I am just bad at figuring out who the murderer is. I just go along with the story and enjoy it. It is all tied up very well in the end. I enjoyed the writing and it made me chuckle at times. The book to me was a quick read and I always looked forward to picking it back up. I would recommend the book but probably not vote it as the best mystery with a dog series, which I am still on the hunt for. show less