My name is Melanie Travis and I work as a special needs tutor at a private school in Connecticut. Summer is my vacation time, which automatically makes those three months my favorite season of the year. Usually I spend summers at dog shows with my family, which of course includes Aunt Peg.

I’ll wait a few seconds while you roll your eyes. Yes, I know. You’ve probably already heard of her. She’s a top breeder and exhibitor of Standard Poodles. She’s also a dog show judge. Aunt Peg is a woman of many opinions and she’s not shy about sharing any of them. With everyone. All the time.

This summer, however, I opted for something different. Oh, I still left plenty of time for going to shows. But I also came up with the brilliant idea to gather a few friends together and start a book club. We called ourselves Bite Club. The name started as a joke, but when we all stopped laughing we decided we actually liked it. It seemed apropos because we intended to concentrate on reading mystery novels—books with bite.

For obvious reasons, I didn’t invite Aunt Peg to join us. My plan was very simple. I just wanted to get together a small group of people from the neighborhood. And Aunt Peg has a tendency to take over and reinvent everything she gets involved with. Unfortunately she isn’t the kind of person who feels she has to wait for an invitation–especially where her relatives are concerned.

Somehow by the third meeting, our cozy little group had grown to more than a dozen members. Half of them had been invited by Aunt Peg, and all the people she’d added were fellow dog show exhibitors. Most, I suspected, had joined the club in the hope that their attendance would curry favor with Aunt Peg in the show ring.

Good luck with that.

The start of that third meeting was delayed when we realized that one of our members was missing. Evan Major was a quiet, bashful, man in his forties, who’d recently relocated to my former neighborhood in Stamford. My longtime friend, Alice Brickman, had brought him to our first gathering, hoping that a gentle introduction to his new neighbors would draw him out of his shell. Now when Evan finally appeared—out of breath and full of apologies–he was also sporting a livid bruise on the side of his jaw.

Evan mentioned a fender bender, and brushed off the group’s concern. When the meeting ended, he pulled me aside and asked if I would be willing to help him train his new Bulldog puppy. Even though I had my suspicions that Even hadn’t told us the real story about his injury, I couldn’t say no to that. I mean, who doesn’t love a Bulldog puppy?

It turned out I should have heeded my initial qualms. Little Bully was indeed adorable and my first training session with Evan went swimmingly. But when I arrived for our second session, I found Bully running loose near the road outside Evan’s house. His owner was nowhere to be found.

You know the old saying, no good deed goes unpunished? I wish I’d thought about that at the time. Because when I scooped up the pudgy puppy and took him home with me for safekeeping, I had no idea that it would lead to my being accused of Evan’s murder.

You can read more about Melanie in Bite Club, the 23rd book in the “Melanie Travis” canine mystery series, coming June 25, 2019.

Melanie Travis’s new book club caters to readers craving fiction—with bite! But when a real-life murder case bares its fangs, she’ll need to swap dog-eared novels for a lengthy suspect list . . .

Thanks to Aunt Peg and her enthusiastic pedigree dog show pals, Melanie’s aptly named Bite Club reading group has book lovers all over town burying their noses in thrilling murder mysteries. But another pet project surfaces when Melanie reluctantly agrees to train a Bulldog puppy for elusive member Evan Major. Between the unusual bruise on his face and a bizarre run-in with an unknown dog show attendee, introverted Evan can’t dodge trouble. It even sends him to an early grave—while landing Melanie in the hot seat for homicide . . .

Caught at the wrong place at the wrong time, Melanie delves into the victim’s shady past to prove her innocence. As she uncovers a juicy scandal that cost Evan his marriage and, possibly, his life, Melanie realizes that booking the real culprit comes down to gathering her pack of suspects together at the next Bite Club meeting. What she doesn’t know is Aunt Peg has been hiding some explosive secrets of her own—secrets that, once unleashed, could pit Melanie against an unpredictable killer bent on bringing this story to an abrupt end . . .

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About the author
Laurien Berenson is the bestselling author of the Melanie Travis canine mystery series. Her books revolve around the world of dog shows, a milieu she knows well as her family has been involved in the sport of dogs for three generations. There are currently twenty-three Melanie Travis mysteries including the newest book, Bite Club.

Berenson is a four-time winner of the Maxwell Award for Fiction from the Dog Writers Assoc. of America and a winner of the Romantic Times Reviewer’s Choice Award. She is also an Agatha and Macavity nominee. Her work has appeared in The New York Times as well as numerous magazines. She is a graduate of Vassar College, and she and her husband live on a farm in Kentucky, surrounded by horses and dogs.

Connect with Laurien at laurienberenson.com, on Facebook, on Twitter, on Goodreads, and on BookBub.

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