Touch and Go

Mercy Watts is a private investigator's daughter who would much rather avoid the paperwork in her father's office. When an old rival asks her to take on a case, she agrees, mostly to escape the filing. The case concerns a missing man, and her plan starts to unravel once she meets the poodle at the centre of things, a dog with problems of its own. Mercy knows that dropping the case would cost her dearly, and the typing waiting for her back at the office is nearly as unbearable. Light, playful and full of small comic jolts, this short novella puts a sharp-witted heroine into a matter that is more tangled than it first appears, with a bad dog and a vanished man at its heart.