Theodora Bentley is participating in a project to count local live, dead, and sick sea otters when she comes upon an unusual sight in The Otter of Death by Betty Webb. Teddy’s personal otter friend, Maureen, comes up to Teddy, clutching a cell phone that is still in camera mode from before Maureen got the phone. On the phone is a selfie of Stuart Booth, a professor of marine science at Betancourt College, showing him in the midst of being murdered.
It doesn’t take long for the police to find the dead body of Booth, and soon Joe Rejas, the sheriff and Teddy’s fiance, arrests Lila Conyers. Lila, a fellow liveaboarder, a person who lives on board a boat, once spray painted Booth’s boat because of sexual harassment that he got away with when she was his young female student. That gives Joe all the ammunition he needed to arrest Lila, but Teddy is certain that Joe has made a mistake and decides to clear the name of her friend. The investigation takes Teddy into the world of high society, where she uncovers dirty secrets among numerous members of the upper crust, including arranged marriages, sugar babies, and sexual harassment.
I have loved all the Gunn Zoo books, and I was highly frustrated to find that the latest books were not on audio, which is almost exclusively my means of reading books due to severe migraines. However, I was so eager to read the rest of the series that I read just a few pages at a time of The Otter of Death with my husband over the course of a month. I was not disappointed and enjoyed this book greatly.
It was enlightening to get a look into those in high society and see how their wealth and status can cause extra complications in their lives. Though this book is fiction, I’m sure the issues the upper crust characters face in it are realistic.
I enjoyed getting to spend time with Joe’s family, getting to know his mother, Colleen, and his children, Tonio and Bridie. However, I would have liked to get to see more of Teddy’s mother, Caroline Piper Bentley Mallory Huffgraf Pettersen Grissom, or Caro, as she insists on having everyone, including her own daughter, call her. I also would have liked to see more of the zoo animals besides Kabuki, the poop-throwing macaque, though I certainly did have fun watching the saga with his bad behavior unfold.
I highly recommend this series to mystery lovers and animal lovers alike, and I give it five stars!
