Sunday? Beginnings! Since John Wilson, in his Friday review of A Farewell to Arfs in the Washington Examiner quotes the beginning, let’s go with that part of his review (behind a paywall).

Here’s Chet’s narrating voice in the very first paragraph of A Farewell to Arfs, which I’m quoting in its entirety: “Who wouldn’t love my job? You see new things every day! Here, for example, we had a perp clinging to a branch high up in a cottonwood tree. That wasn’t the new part. Please don’t get ahead of me — although that’s unlikely to happen, your foot speed and mine being … very different, let’s leave it at that with no hurt feelings.”
Even from this very brief excerpt, you can pick up a lot about Chet as the narrator. He’s cheerful, for starters. That doesn’t mean he is always happy, of course — that would soon pall — but he’s upbeat by nature. We, meaning readers who enjoy his voice, who stick with his narratives feeling no sense of strain, admire his spirit; laugh, not harshly, at his foibles and misunderstandings, not the least of which are verbal; and are genuinely touched by his friendship with Bernie, who is a deeply appealing character in his own right.
All is not sweetness and light here, though. On the contrary, Chet and Bernie inhabit the same old world you and I know firsthand. But whereas many highly praised crime novels are self-consciously “dark,” and, hence, ultimately boring, to me at least, A Farewell to Arfs, the very title of which dares you to condescend to it, and the rest of the books in the series give us light and darkness intermingled. At the heart of this latest book is AI’s ability to wreak harm, a threat about which Quinn is all too persuasive, in case we were inclined to pooh-pooh such concerns: persuasive, but never preachy.
So check out this latest offering in the series. If you enjoy it, as I hope you will, spread the word, not least among your fiction-reading friends and acquaintances who are also dog lovers. Meanwhile, you can go back to the first book and start to catch up. You may find yourself reading the whole lot before the next book appears.