The Secret of Bones

Logan’s appealing sequel to 2019’s The Scent of Murder finds Jazz Ramsey, whose day job is administrative assistant at St. Catherine’s Preparatory Academy for Girls in Cleveland, training her Airedale puppy, Wally, to become a cadaver dog and sniff out dead bodies for the police. Jazz gets pressed into giving the students a cadaver dog demonstration on career day at St. Catherine’s, but what should have been a fascinating hour turns grim when Wally sniffs out a body in the school’s attic. The dead woman was former religion teacher Bernadette Quinn, who left the school three years earlier under a cloud. Bernadette was fanatic about her religion, but a good teacher and something of a special project for principal Sister Eileen Flannery. Jazz is dismayed when the police begin to suspect that the person with the strongest motive for murder was Sister Eileen, so Jazz takes it upon herself to discover who really had it out for Bernadette. Smooth prose more than compensates for a couple of unlikely events. Red herrings, a developing romance, and just the right amount of information about cadaver dogs help make this a winner. Agent: Gail Fortune, Talbot Fortune. (May)