Susan Conant - Evil Breeding

Praise for Susan Conants
Dog Lovers Mysteries

T HE B ARKER S TREET R EGULARS

Sherlockians especially will enjoy Conants latest dog mystery featuring journalist Holly Winter in her most intricate case yet.

Publishers Weekly

Dog lore and Sherlockiana will keep Conants audience interested. Recommended.

Deadly Pleasures

S TUD R ITES

An intimate knowledge of Alaskan malamutes isnt necessary to appreciate Susan Conants Stud Rites. Conants characterizations are dead-on and her descriptions of doggy kitschmost notably a malamute-shaped lamp trimmed with a dead champions furare hilarious.

Los Angeles Times

Conants doggy tales are head and shoulders above many of the other series in which various domestic pets aid or abet in the solving of crimes. Should appeal to everyone who is on the right end of a leash.

The Purloined Letter

B LACK R IBBON

A fascinating murder mystery and a very, very funny book written with a fairness that even Dorothy Sayers or Agatha Christie would admire. Mobile Register

R UFFLY S PEAKING

Conants dog lovers series, starring Cambridge freelance dog-magazine reporter Holly Winter and her two malamutes, Rowdy and Kimi, is a real tail-wagger.

The Washington Post

B LOODLINES

Highly recommended for lovers of dogs, people, and all-around good storytelling.

Mystery News

Lively, funny, and absolutely premium, Conants readerswith ears up and alert eyeseagerly await her next.

Kirkus Reviews

G ONE TO THE D OGS

Conant infuses her writing with a healthy dose of humor about Hollys fido-loving friends and other Cambridge clichs. The target of her considerable wit clearly emerges as human nature.

Publishers Weekly

A NIMAL A PPETITE

Swift and engrossing.

Publishers Weekly

Invigorating Conant gives us a cool, merry, and informative look at academic Cambridge.

Kirkus Reviews

The Alaskan malamute called Tazs, mentioned in this book, is Ch. Foxfires Szatahni Tosah, WWPD, WTD, WPD, WLD, WWPDX, CGC. Tazs is owned and adored by Delores Lieske. Thank you, Delores, for letting me borrow this miraculous combination of sweetness, strength, beauty, and charm. I am once again grateful to Chris and Eileen Gabriel for graciously letting me name a fictional cat after their legendary Alaskan malamute, the late Tracker, Ch. Kailas Paw Print. For help with the background of this book, I want to thank Janice Ritter and her highly accomplished and sweet-tempered German shepherd dogs, especially SG-Jagger vom Mack-Zwinger, SchH1, AD, CGC.

Many thanks also to Jean Berman, Dorothy Donohue, Alice Gerhart, Roseann Mandell, Emma Parsons, Phyllis Stein, Geoff Stern, Margherita Walker, and Anya Wittenborg.

I am blessed with the perfect agent, Deborah Schneider, and the perfect editor, Kate Miciak. Huzzah!

F. SCOTT FITZGERALD was right. The very rich really are different from you and me. They can afford more dogs. Geraldine R. Dodge, for example, had opulent kennel space for a hundred and fifty. Ten or twelve dogs always lived in the house with her. The house had thirty-five rooms.

Geraldine R. The R was for Rockefeller. She was me with money.

Or thats how Id always thought of her. From her birth in 1882 until her death in 1973, she broke record after record for looniness on the subject of dogs, dogs, and more dogs, exceeding even the most maniacal excesses of yours truly, because she could afford to indulge this joyful madness, and I cant. Speaking of dogs, as Mrs. Dodge, I am sure, habitually did from woofy sunrise until late into the drooly, furry night, I was raised with, and to a large extent by, golden retrievers. I eventually emerged from a belated psychosocial identity crisis with an independent sense of self, by which I mean that I got a new dog of a new breed. He was and most vibrantly remains a male Alaskan malamute named Rowdy. He, together with my malamute bitch, Kimi, is overwhelmingly who I am. Should you lack fluency in the dialect of purebred dogdom, let me point out that in calling my lovely Kimi a bitch, I am not talking dirty about her. I myself, I might add, am a female dog person and a bitch only when the situation warrants it.

The daughter of William Rockefeller, John D.s brother, Ethel Geraldine Rockefeller didnt exactly start out poor. In 1907, when she married Marcellus Hartley Dodge, the Remington Arms heir, the two were heralded as the richest couple in America. The groom, at the age of twenty-six, was worth about sixty million dollars. His fortune was rumored to be smaller than his brides. Miss Rockefeller had no need to marry for money. Love? Or was it perhaps animal magnetism that drew her to a man with a nameM. Hartley Dodgecomposed of letters that could be rearranged to spell Tamely herd dog as well as They dream gold?

Geraldine R. Dodge: Indeed, larger dog.

Anagrams aside, Mr. and Mrs. M. Hartley Dodge are still semifamous not only for enjoying stupendous wealth but, weirdly enough, for sleeping apart. Wouldnt you think all that money could have bought privacy? But as Ill explain, the arrangement would have been difficult to keep secret, and in fact, its public knowledge. I found it on the World Wide Web in an article about the health benefits of sleeping alone. Mr. and Mrs. M. Hartley Dodge were cited as an example, perhaps because they carried the practice to an extreme: They inhabited separate manor houses on adjacent properties in Madison, New Jersey. She lived at Giralda Farms, he at Hartley Farms. The marriage lasted until the death of M. Hartley Dodge at the age of eighty-two. He died on Christmas Day, 1963. His widow outlived him by almost ten years. She died on August 13, 1973. M. Hartley Dodge bequeathed most of his money to charities, including his alma mater, Columbia University, and to various cousins. His widow got personal effects, family portraits, assorted jewelry, an unspecified number of automobiles, and a house and some of his property in Madison, plus small change: a paltry hundred thousand dollars in cash. When she died, her estate was valued at eighty-five million dollars. I know these details, you see. I made it my business to research them.

My actual business, to which I have already alluded, is the unprofitable enterprise of writing for what my editor at DogsLife magazine facetiously refers to as money. Maybe youve seen my column? Holly Winter? The photo on the masthead is better of Rowdy and Kimi than it is of me. When knowledgeable readers write to me, they often remark on the dogs beautiful heads. No one ever mentions my head. My kind of reader is too busy studying the fine points of my dogs to give me more than a glance that swiftly passes once its clear that I am human. If you meet the dogs and me, youll see that the photo hasnt set you up for the kind of rude surprise I had recently when I went to a book signing in Harvard Square and discovered that the author didnt look like a movie star at all. What Id mistaken for the womans literary cultivation of a stylishly evocative out-of-date hairdo turned out to have another and simpler explanation: The photo had obviously been taken fifty years ago. I wouldnt want to let my readers in for that kind of horrid shock. As shown in