It's the boiling summer of 1976 and one year old collie-cross Brucie expects to be offed by the vet at the kennels where the RSPCA placed him after he was removed from his first human. Except that at the eleventh hour a red-haired fifty five year old artist called Ginger comes to the rescue, and even before he is released from his cage by the gay-spirited Kennel Lad, Brucie has tumbled into love with her and her two sets of quirky boy-girl teenage twins. The family's worn but comfy seaside house looks onto a recently unveiled statue of Winston Churchill that Ginger claims to dislike because it blocks her view of the sea; a half-truth which stirs the detective within Brucie as he sets out to understand the grief which fuels the increasingly wild antics of his new humans.
To which end - and despite a fever that's making him so hot he could grow the coat of a red setter - he uses his powerful second sight to access the memories of fifteen year olds Rachel and Craig, and sixteen year olds Vanessa and Jack: thereby taking us on a series of connected journeys that see a ladybird lost up Vanessa's nose, a rebuke of a bodging dentist who wears a wig that's called 'the rug', and Jack's coming of age as he defends his well and truly battered mum against further domestic violence. Having returned to 1976, Brucie is left puzzled as to why car-loving Craig is the one most affected by the recent suicide of their war-traumatised father, Raymond. A line of enquiry that leads back to the 1940s when twenty-five year old Raymond's ship was torpedoed by the Germans and he left a crewmate with a big similarity to his youngest son Craig - as yet unborn of course - to die in the burning sea. Having gained an understanding of the complex relationship between Raymond and Craig an exhausted Brucie is now dangerously hot. Will he die? Or will he live and help save his beloved 'kid' from the self-hate that Raymond's bullying of him has caused?
Even more so, will he be able to nudge young Craig into returning the beautiful love which the Kennel Lad has to give?
- ISBN10 0956693202
- ISBN13 9780956693204
- Publish Date 1 November 2010
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 10 January 2013
- Publish Country GB
- Publisher Berry Press
- Imprint Zircon Press
- Format Paperback
- Pages 230
- Language English