A review by jackie_of_all_books
Furbidden Fatality by Deborah Blake

3.0

1st book in the 3 book series. It was a good read. Left me on my toes until the very end of the book and had a happy ending. Kari Stuart finds a kitten running around her apartment and when she tries to take it to the shelter she is told that all of the shelters are full. She asks about the rescue and is told that they are being shut down. She impulsively goes and buys the shelter after recently winning a 5 million dollar lottery. She takes her best friend Suz with her to see the place for the first time. The former owner Daisy are her volunteers are there and upset due to current charges they are facing. When Kari tells Daisy she bought the place Daisy is so happy for her but warns her about how awful the dog warden is. The dog warden had recently turned in one of their Pit Bull Rescues multiple times as escaping and being aggressive. He was trying to press charges that he had attacked someone. Kari went with Daisy to the court date is where she got into a fight with the Dog warden. He didn’t bring the victim to the court date and claims he definitely exists and then told Kari she would be better off selling the place to him with Daisy informs her he had been trying to get her to sell the place for cheap. Not that it was worth much the rescue needed a lot of improvements but with winning the lottery Kari planned on turning it around and serving her purpose. She also decided to keep the kitten that originally made her buy the rescue. Everything changed when her neighbor and her cat woke her up in the middle of the night. The dogs were all going crazy and then she discovered the dog wardens dead body outside of her rescue. When she called the cops they were quick to accuse her due to the fact that she had just had a heated argument with him outside of the court house and due to living alone she had no witnesses that she had been in bed putting her as the #1 suspect of the murder. Coming in second was former owner Daisy who is now stuck staying in town until the case is cleared. Kari and her volunteers begin to do a little investigation of their own on the murder so that she doesn’t stay the prime suspect. Kari gets awoken by her kitten again in the middle of the night and goes outside and doesn’t notice anything so she goes back to bed, just to be awoken in the morning by her volunteer Brynn saying she needs to come outside where her freshly painted building now says “murderer” and “hore”. Now she is really looking into the investigation and the police still don’t seem to be taking it seriously. A few nights later she is awoken again to find they smashed her windows and endangered her cats. All hands on deck to clean the glass out of the enclosures and replace the windows. That is when she gets cameras and an alarm installed. Then she is awoken to the alarm. And it just so happens to be a night hee brother is at the house. They go outside to find 2 of the local cops are trying to break into her alarm box after smashing one of her windows. Her brother had called the sheriff who arrived and is appalled that is own deputies had been behind the vandalism but still not sure that they were the murderers. That’s when the cops start to talk and say that the county clerk did it. That she had been embezzling money for years and that’s why the dog warden and the cops had been working with her was they were getting money from these dog fines. But she had embezzled bigger things and the warden wanted in on it so they believed she murdered him. When the sheriff spoke to the county clerk after arresting both of his deputies he did find her guilty of the embezzlement and that she had weapons in her car and admitted to a plan of murdering the dog warden but she hadn’t done it yet someone beat her to it. The cops called it case closed and moved on. That was until Georgia a former police deputy called Kari and told her her German shepherd who the dog warden had said had been put down showed up on her back porch. That leaves Kari to believe that some of the other dogs the warden claimed were getting put down could still be out there but the sheriff wouldn’t listen to her. She met with the county clerk who told her if she cleared her of the murder charges she would tell her where the dog wardens book or everything he’s done is. Which would clear Buster and also potentially tell them where peoples dogs are. So her, Georgia, and Georgias dog Pepper set out for the hills. Pepper first showed them where he had been tied up by rope to a tree at and then he led them to a little shack in the woods where they discovered a meth lab but before they could escape. Curtis the owner of the local bar found them and said he was going to kill them. That was until Kari faked a snake being on the ground and Georgia was able to shoot Curtis in the leg and her dog was able to apprehend him. They then called the sheriff to meet them. Curtis was found guilty for the murder of the dog warden. The county clerk told Kari where to found the book, it was there. And had all the answers. The sheriff was going to work on paying back the community for all the fines they paid for no reason. He was also going to work to find the missing dogs. And Brutus was cleared. The town also got a new dog warden who was not mean and cruel unlike the last one. And the new vet in town who volunteers at the shelter and is on call asked Kari out for coffee. Kari was finally able to have her open house of the shelter and it was going very successful due to how many people in the community were happy to have their dogs back. The dog warden gone. And the sheriff wants to potentially start training rescue dogs as K-9 units. All in all a good read!