Reviews

The Barbary Dogs by Cynthia Robinson

diannel_04's review

1.0

Max Bravo's estranged friend friend commits suicide and charges him with cleaning out his stuff. While doing that Maxfinds his diary. That night he wakes up to find his dead grandmother lacking the pages of the diary and telling him it was written by two men, the one who killed himself and the dead man who drove him to do it. That's when I stopped reading.

beckmank's review

3.0

This was another random pick up from the library. I walked by the table where it sat, and the cover with the dogs caught my eye. Underneath the title, it says "a mystery." Sold. Well, this book was much different than I thought it would be. The mystery itself is hard to pinpoint. I suppose it is the mystery of what drove Frank to jump off of the Golden Gate bridge. It's more of a book about Max, his life in San Francisco with his pug Dixie, and some events set in motion after Frank's jump. I found the book quite funny, and really enjoyed the premise at the beginning. It would jump between present day, and the past when Max was friends with Frank. The middle turned a corner with the supernatural, and the ending to me was unsatisfying.

I would like to point out that the cover is very misleading. There is a pug pictured (Dixie), but the other three dogs are not in the story at all. In fact, while the Barbary Coast is a part of the book, there are zero dogs related to this plot line. And instead of "A Mystery" it should probably be "a second tale from Max Bravo's life," since apparently there is a book before this one. This definitely wasn't a mystery in the traditional sense. I guess the true mystery for me is, what happened to these other three dogs on the cover?