The Dog Of The North by Elizabeth McKenzie

 

Penny Rush's life is a mess.  Her marriage has just fallen apart.  She has gotten calls about her grandparents, each of whom needs attention although they have been divorced for years.  Her grandmother has become a hoarder and is living in a house full of stuff and worse, apparently threatened the social services worker who came to check on her with a gun.  Her grandfather remarried and his wife is only interested in his money.  He had a recent fall and his wife is determined to use that to get him out of his house.

There's nothing to it but for Penny to quit her job and head to the rescue.  She is met by her grandmother's accountant with whom she has created a ruse to get her grandmother out of the house so the team of cleaners Penny has hired can get in and get the house back into some semblance of order while Penny finds and disposes of the gun.  But the plan falls apart when the accountant collapses while in the house and is rushed to the hospital along with Penny's grandmother who was a doctor.

In the meantime, Penny heads to her grandfather's house.  He is about as ready to leave the house as his wife is ready for him to go so Penny helps him arrange a reverse mortgage and check into a senior citizen development.  Five years ago, Penny's parents had disappeared while in Australia visiting her sister and her grandfather wants the two of them to go there and try one more time to find them.  Penny is okay with that but in the meantime, the police have been finding suspicious things on her grandmother's property.  What's a girl to do?

Elizabeth McKenzie is an author whose books I always read.  Her forte is creating offbeat characters that the reader quickly becomes attached to and situations that seem like they could never happen but somehow do.  Penny follows this path as she attempts to take care of her grandparents, find her parents and maybe find love along the way.  This book is recommended for readers of literary fiction.