Barking Up the Right Tree by Leigh Russell

I have only recently started reading mysteries and since I’m a complete and total coward, I tend to gravitate to those that won’t scare me or give me nightmares. Usually that means golden age mysteries (or current iterations) or ones that are more caper than mystery. It sounds like cozy mysteries should work well for me but somehow they don’t. There’s something just a little light weight about them that turns me off. That doesn’t stop me from trying them periodically though. Unfortunately, Leigh Russell’s Barking Up the Right Tree, the first in a new cozy series, didn’t change my opinion on these types of mysteries.

When Emily loses her job and then gets dumped by her boyfriend, she has no idea what to do with her life. Then Emily discovers her long lost great aunt has died and left her a picturesque cottage in rural Ashton Mead. In order to properly inherit, she must take care of any pets that her great aunt pre-deceased and so after thinking that she’d only be taking care of a goldfish, she agrees to the terms. But in fact the pet is a loveable dog named Poppy. Poppy wants desperately to dig under the metal fence between the cottage and the garden next door, the owner of whom is not friendly at all. This escalates quickly into Emily deciding that next door’s daughter is missing. And it’s a short step from there for her to decide that her great aunt’s fatal fall was not an accident.

Emily is a completely insipid, and rather stupid character who doesn’t understand why her new friends think she’s over the top and can’t see that her boyfriend’s reappearance after she inherits the cottage is a huge issue. She makes snap judgments about people but then flip flops on her unearned judgments like she's going pro at it. The mystery itself stutters along until the very end, when it makes such a sharp left turn that it leaves the reader wondering if 2/3 of a cozy mystery was uncomfortably grafted onto 1/3 of a horror story with obviously visible Frankenstein stitches. The meshing of the two pieces of the plot is not well done, the main character is annoying, and the writing is unfortunately repetitious. I won't be reading further in this series.