Reviewed for Netgalley. Excellent book that had me hooked from page one and is really an amazing mish-mash of romance, fables, humour, story-telling, cyber-crime and cultural differences which, if you'd pitched it to me wouldn't sound very good, but once you start reading; it carries you away. Daniel is a forty something literary agent who is worried about his job, believes he is incapable of being in love and needs someone to walk his dogs. Enter Annie - an Irish girl in LA for a few months who offers via a flyer under Daniel's door . Daniel meets her and discovers she is a redhead and he has a catastrophic fear of redheads from a car accident as a child. He tells Annie she can't walk his dogs via a diary left on the kitchen table whereby she starts to write stories that cast his dogs as reincarnated heroes from a mystical world and Daniel is smitten.
Thus they correspond on paper, while Daniel meets a like minded "can't fall in love" woman from his building, reads a novel that will be the next Harry Potter and convinces his boss to sign up Annie as not only a dog walker but also house sitter while he and his wife cruise the Caribbean.
What happens next I DID NOT see coming - Daniel is charged with cyber theft of 2.5 million dollars of his bosses ' money and it all points to him being set up by Annie, who by now, he has fallen hopelessly in love with.
The second half of the book sees Daniel in a Shawshank Redemptionesque quest to clear his name and find out if Annie was lying to him all that time.
I must say that I guessed who the thief/ thieves were from the start but then I read A LOT of crime fiction, so I am always on the hunt for clues. Loved the red herring with the spy twin sister though...almost had me fooled but not quite.
A lovely, quirky romance that people would snap up and you don't even have to be a dog lover! ( )

I recently started a book challenge list that asked me to read a book with the word “dog” in the title and to my delight when searching the NetGalley list The Dog Walker’s Diary came up first.

Daniel Ashe is a literary agent who has never fell in love and is looking for an awesome story to get his career moving. Oh, and unbeknownst to him, he is looking for a dog walker for his dog’s Sparks and Eddie.

Annie Doherty is a beguiling, red-headed, Irish dog walker/witty short story writer who is Daniel’s unexpected nemesis.

See my complete review at The Eclectic Review ( )