The Perfect Date by Julia Crouch @thatjuliacrouch #SarahDurham @bookouture @NetGalley @HachetteUK

the setup…
Caroline (Caz) Sessions is a professional dog walker living in Brighton with her mother Ruth. She’s really good at it, too, and always has her own border collie rescue dog Joe with her. One morning during one of her dog outings, Joe breaks from her and leads her to a body. As horrifying as that discovery was, what made it worse was Caz recognized who it was…Harry, the man she’d been dating and who’d stood her up last night. As if this wasn’t bad enough, the same thing happened to her six months ago in London! Uh, oh.

the heart of the story…
Let’s back up a minute. When Joe the dog discovered Caz’s guy Ash in London, she was the primary suspect for a hot minute until her alibi cleared her. That one night in jail terrified her and ruined her life. She resigned from her teaching job and returned to live with her mother who had recently had a fall and needed some help. Now to have it happen again defies the laws of probability and if the police made the connection…well. Caz is also house and dog sitting a Maltipoo called Bridget Jones for her former BFF Marcy who is away taking care of her own father. Marcy and Caz have only recently reunited after splitting because Marcy stole boyfriend Mark. Yeah, Caz’s life is sort of a mess but it gets worse as the story progresses because she makes terrible choices along the way. Soon she’s surrounded by people from Marcy’s neighborhood, any one of them a potential suspect. But the worst decisions she makes is to not always follow dog Joe’s lead who is the smartest pooch ever. Even I knew a few minutes in that he has better judgment than Marcy. And, yes, he’s the heart of this story!

the narration…
I thought Sarah Durham was pitch perfect, especially as Caz. She gave great voice distinctions to all the key characters and did wonderful storytelling. But she really got Caz’s craziness and fear.

the bottom line…
Caz made so many terrible, TSTL (too stupid to live) decisions as the situations kept getting worse. But she was making a lot of them out of fear and being in the blind about what may be behind what’s going on. I was all over the place with the suspects…was it John, the next door neighbor’s new ex-con boyfriend, or the stalker fool Edwin from London, or ex-beau back-in-the-picture Mark or even Marcy running a game on her, or Peter the retired police detective? There’s an explosive secret that opens things up and I did guess before the reveal but this was a fun and challenging psychological thriller ride. And Joe the rescue pooch? He’s the real hero.

Book Info

• Release Date: October 6, 2023
• Narrator: Sarah Durham
• Audio Length: 9 hours, 24 minutes
• Publisher: Hachette UK – Bookouture

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(Thanks to NetGalley and Bookouture Audio for my complimentary copy. All opinions are my own.)