Polly Parrett owns and runs a pet-sitting service while also providing care to her mother after a bad fall. As the story opens, Polly’s mother wants to sell her large six-bedroom house as the “rambling old farmhouse” has gotten to be too much for her to care for. Polly’s parents split two years before, and Polly and her two brothers were trying to convince mom to let it go.

Although Polly would have preferred to keep the house, she hired Tyler Breslin of Breslin Realty Associates to help them out. What she hadn’t expected was what she called “a hottie” and the ups and downs they would encounter in trying to get the house up for sale.

One night after Tyler took Polly out to dinner, as they were leaving the restaurant an altercation was taking place in a nearby alley. Ultimately, they found that a local policeman was accusing “Rooster” a homeless man who had a rescue dog named Elaine, of murder.

Although the police ended up taking Rooster to jail and Elaine to the pound, Tyler and Polly worked on their behalf to get them out and back together again.

When another murder occurred, the clues started to point in an unexpected direction. Ultimately, almost everyone near and dear to Polly became a target, and it wasn’t until Polly herself was gravely attacked that the truth finally came out – just in time for Christmas.

Doggone Christmas: A Polly Parrett Pet-Sitter Cozy Murder Mystery Book 1 by Liz Dodwell is packed full of humor, intrigue, and twists and turns throughout. Although this book is the first of the Polly Parrett series, the author also has a Captain Finn Treasure Mystery series of three novels with a fourth on the way.

This prolific writer keeps the plot rolling along to the point where a reader can just start to settle back and relax while turning to the next page, when all of a sudden something unexpected turns everything around. Although this isn’t a long book, it certainly doesn’t lack in intrigue, mystery, love of pets and people, and characters that we will want to see again.

Doggone Christmas gives us one of the most satisfying endings I’ve read in a long time. It’s a feel-good story that many of us need to settle in and read during the holiday season, although the story can easily be read any time of year.

A special thank you goes to the author for providing us a PDF version of this story in exchange for our review. If you are interested in reading any of Liz Dodwell’s books, they are available at Amazon.com.