Shadow, the dog, does indeed save the day and all the parts of the book that relate to him, especially when we get his canine view of the world, work very well. Although the plot shows this behaviour to be abnormal it still felt to me like it was playing to all the wrong fears and stigma attached to autistic kids. There are also some very dubious portrayals of the behaviour of autistic children. The body count keeps rising, making the bad guys into spree killers rather than devious villains. I’d barely started the book and had seen one person shot in the face at close range and another stabbed to death. This is too hard-edged and has too much violence in it for a cosy mystery. What I got was less clichéd than that but also less easy to settle into. I thought I’d be reading a dog-centric cosy mystery with a kick-ass heroine and her save-the-day dog. “Lost and Found” wasn’t what I’d expected from the publisher’s summary.
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