Author: Jeffrey Cohen
Cover Artist: Tammy Sneath Grimes
Publisher: Bancroft Press
Binding: Paperback
Publication Date: 2005
Another beach read! As in the first Aaron Tucker Mystery, Jeffrey Cohen does a marvelous job of characterization in this third installation, As Dog is My Witness. The biggest strength of the series is the family setting, which is real enough to jump off the page.
Cohen is a genius in the way he weaves in his own real life knowledge—he, like the main character Aaron Tucker, has a son with Aspergers (a high-functioning form of autism.) In the book, Cohen manages to drop information about Aspergers without preaching. Ethan, the Aspergers character, is a mainstay in earlier books, but in this book, he plays an important part in solving the mystery.
The plot is fairly strong throughout, as is the side issue of Tucker managing a personal problem in the form of freeloading relatives. Tucker even managed to involve the mob in this caper and I truly enjoyed that mix-in—humor and light-heartedness are the key. Puns are part of Cohen’s style; in this particular book, especially at the beginning, they were a bit too frequent and distracting for me, but nothing that can’t be glossed over.
I would have liked to see a little more depth to the actual mystery/plot; something I thought was better developed in the first book of this series, “For Whom the Minivan Rolls.” While the side problems in As Dog is My Witness keep things moving, I think the ending suffered a tad from the lack of suspects. There’s a twist to the ending, but in this case, I think the simpler ending it seemed headed for would have not only made more sense, but sufficed.
Still, the book has heart, puns abound and the characters are easy to care about.
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