Diane Kelly’s The Long Paw of the Law took me to an entirely different culture. Instead of a human partner, Fort Worth, Texas, policewoman Megan Cruz works with a K9 one—and she very much prefers it that way. She’s smart and is working hard so she can advance in the ranks up to detective. In this novel, she’s called in on a case of an abandoned baby found at a firehouse by her partner, bomb squad technician and firefighter Seth.

Megan is instantly smitten with the baby and notes she’s wrapped in a lovely quilt and outfitted with beautifully knitted booties and hat. On closer examination of the quilt, she sees that the word “help” has been hastily stitched into the hem, and this makes her determined, as the infant is taken into foster care, to find out what has happened to the baby’s mother.


This book is a good short course on more or less routine police patrol work—someone is breaking into garages by stealing the garage remotes—and a look at the work of Megan’s K9 partner. This work is front and center as Megan squeezes in helping with the investigation into the baby, as well as helping Seth solve the problem of his grouchy, recently widowed grandfather.

Megan is a smart cookie and uses her wits to help solve both the garage break-ins and the case of the baby, but she’s not unbelievably brilliant, instead coming across more like a flesh-and-blood human being. She’s quite appealing, and you’re soon cheering right along with her as she cracks both cases.