The Scent of Murder by Kylie Logan

The Scent of Murder by Kylie Logan ISBN-13: 9781250180612 Hardcover: 320 pages Publisher: Minotaur Books Released: May 7, 2019

Source: ebook review copy from the publisher through NetGalley.

Book Description, Modified from Goodreads:
The way Jazz Ramsey figures it, life is pretty good. She’s thirty-five years old and owns her own home in one of Cleveland’s most diverse, artsy, and interesting neighborhoods. She has a job she likes as an administrative assistant at an all-girls school, and a volunteer interest she’s passionate about—Jazz is a cadaver dog handler.

Jazz is putting Luther, a cadaver dog in training, through his paces at an abandoned building. When Luther signals a find, Jazz is stunned to see the body of a young woman and even more shocked when she realizes that beneath the tattoos and the piercings and all that pale makeup is a familiar face. The lead detective on the case is an old lover, and the murdered woman is an old student. Jazz finds herself obsessed with learning the truth.


My Review:
The Scent of Murder is a cozy mystery which uses the fact that the heroine is a cadaver dog handler as the reason why she discovers bodies. The police have the investigation under control, but Jazz can't mentally move on after finding the body of a girl she knew. She decides to ask questions in an attempt to process what happened. While she does uncover some information, she largely asked the same things that the police did and didn't really add anything to the investigation until the very end. While asking questions, though, she managed to anger several people by basically accusing them of having affairs or murdering the girl.

This was a clue based mystery, and you can guess the identity of the murderer before the police or Jazz. The information about search and rescue and cadaver dog training was interesting, but it was not the main focus of the story. The characters didn't really engage me. Probably partly because Jazz thinks her relationship with the detective was "so good" (which we see no evidence of--it seems more antagonistic) yet she won't make him a priority in her life even when he's trying to.

There were no sex scenes. There was a fair amount of bad language of all sorts (including b**ch). Overall, I'd recommend this interesting mystery to dog lovers.


If you've read this book, what do you think about it? I'd be honored if you wrote your own opinion of the book in the comments.