The Secrets of Bones

Jazz Ramsey Mystery Series, Book 2

By: Kylie Logan

Narrated by: Chloe Cannon

Length: 8 hrs and 43 mins

Publisher's summary

Assembly Day at St. Catherine's dawns bright and cloudless as professional women gather from all around Ohio to talk to the schoolgirls about their careers ranging from medicine, to NASA, to yoga. Jazz Ramsey has also signed up to give the girls a taste of her lifelong passion: cadaver dog training. Her adorable new puppy Wally hasn't been certified yet, so she borrows the fully-trained Gus from a friend and hides a few bones in the unused fourth floor of the school for him to find.

The girls are impressed when Gus easily finds the first bone, but then Gus heads confidently to a part of the floor where Jazz is sure no bones are hidden - at least, not any that she's put there. But Gus is a professional, and sure enough, behind a door that no one has opened in ages, is a human skeleton. Jazz recognizes the necklace the skeleton is wearing, and that it belonged to Bernadette Quinn, an ex-teacher at the school who'd quit her job abruptly one Christmas break. But now it seems Bernadette never left the school at all, and her hiding place makes it clear: this was murder.

Bernadette in life had been a difficult personality, and so there are a plethora of suspects inside the school and out of it. As Jazz gets closer to the truth she can't help but wonder if someone might be dogging her footsteps....

©2020 Connie Laux (P)2021 Tantor

another ok but not great tale.

So the detective boyfriend gives our heroine an airedale as a new puppy to train -- because he knows someone who has them. It's true that a number of breeds have made it to cadaver dogs, but the vast majority are Labradors or German shepherds. I'd have been disappointed if the current "in" breed for detective stories had been a Malinois (for one thing, in the attack scene, any malinois worth the name would have bitten the attacker if it was more than 6 months), but there's not much there about the pros and cons or unique qualities of the airedale either (while not usual, they have, in the past also served as police dogs). And as with the first story, once the find is made, the dog pretty much vanishes from the story. You get a reference or two about "going to training" but nothing about the dog's development or skills (good or bad, not all dogs make the grade). As to the story itself? it's not bad, but there's just a fair amount of unreality about it (how long does a dna test take? the whispering chapel is POSSIBLE, but not particularly believable and the "nun" teacher is frankly not that believable at all.