Book Review//Guilty Creatures: A Menagerie of Mysteries

My life has been full of animals these days. My daughter attends a technical high school where she is in an animal care and management program. She absolutely loves it and regularly sends me photos of the animals she is working with. In the last few days, I have received photos of a skink, a snake, a turtle, and rats. I have heard long and enthusiastic stories about guinea pigs, chinchillas, goats, dogs, and fish. She lives, sleeps, and breathes animals.

Since animals were taking over my life anyway I thought Guilty Creatures would be the perfect book to read. The blurb on the back of the book says:

Since the dawn of the crime fiction genre, animals of all kinds have played a memorable part in countless mysteries, and in a variety of roles: the perpetrator, the key witness, the sleuth’s trusted companion. This collection of fourteen stories corrals plots centred around cats, dogs and insects alongside more exotic incidents involving gorillas, parakeets and serpents-complete with a customary shoal of red herrings.

This anthology has stories by Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Wallace, Christianna Brand, and many other authors who were not as familiar to me. In some stories, the animal was front and center and in some, the animal was more of a supporting cast member. It is hard to write about short stories because they are so short. If I say too much then I give away the plot. Suffice it to say, I enjoyed these. They were the perfect length to pick up and read on break or in the few minutes I had between tasks. Sometimes I figured out who did it and how the animal was involved and sometimes I didn’t. Some of the stories were stronger than others but none were so weak I wondered why they were included. I now have a few new-to-me authors to look into more thoroughly.

The British Library does an excellent job at selecting books and stories to include in this series. It is such a joy to see these authors being republished. Plus, the covers are so gorgeous. My thanks to them for the review copy of this book.