The Dog Sitter Detective's Christmas Tail by Antony Johnston Narrator: Nicolette McKenzie
Series: The Dog Sitter Detective #4
Published by Soundings on December 9, 2025
Source: Purchased
Genres: Mystery
Length: 8 hrs 21 mins
Pages: 320
Format: Audiobook
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It's almost Christmas, and Gwinny Tuffel's thoughts are on what she'll buy for DCI Birch (retired) and whether she can adopt another furry friend. But sorting through her late father's papers leads her into his mysterious past, pointing to an enigmatic liaison now living in a Somerset commune. Gwinny and Birch find themselves unexpectedly snowed in with a group of retired spies, along with an energetic Cocker Spaniel, and embroiled in a murder case. Will they uncover the culprit and escape in time for Christmas?
The Dog Sitter Detective’s Christmas Tail has lots of things I enjoy in a mystery – Christmas, dogs, a snowed-in house full of suspects, but I just didn’t really enjoy it. Gwinny is an actress trying to revive her career and is dog-sitting for a bit of money or fostering a dog for no money in this case. She’s dating Birch, a retired Detective Chief Inspector who has a black lab. You know from the blurb that the two of them end up snowed in in a house with 6 former spies. One of the spies, their host actually, ends up dead. Gwinny and Birch feel like it’s up to them to discover who the killer is.
I have not read the others in the series, but this one felt like it worked well enough as a standalone. We get some background on Gwinny and Birch and are told that she’s solved a couple of cases in the past, but this one feels self-contained.
The set-up felt forced. Burch tracks down this retired MI-6 spy, and the spy just invites Gwinny to his house. And it’s fine when she brings along Birch and two dogs. Gwinny and Birch fail to check the weather forecast and end up snowed in at essentially a stranger’s house. The clues come together well enough but it just felt a little unlikely to me, and I didn’t care about any of the characters. Even Gwinny was somehow bland.
About Antony Johnston
Antony Johnston (born 25 August 1972) is a British writer of comics, video games, and novels. He is known for the post-apocalyptic comic series Wasteland, the graphic novel The Coldest City (adapted for film as Atomic Blonde), and his work on several Image Comics series. In May 2023, Johnston published The Dog Sitter Detective, the first in a series.
An experienced podcaster and public speaker, he also frequently writes articles on the life of an author, and is a prolific musician.
Antony is a former vice chair of the Crime Writers’ Association, a member of International Thriller Writers and the Society of Authors, a Shore Scripts screenwriting judge, and sits on the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain’s videogames committee.
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