Bestselling author Koontz tells the story of how he and his wife, Gerda, unexpectedly met and fell in love with a golden retriever named Trixie. The author relates how this former service dog renewed in him a sense of wonder that will remain with him for the rest of his life. Distributed by Syndetic Solutions, Inc.

*Starred Review* In 1998, after years of consideration, Dean and Gerda Koontz finally got a dog. Trixie was a golden retriever trained by the Canine Companions for Independence, which Koontz has plugged in the acknowledgments or afterwords in some of his books. Retired early from companionship by joint surgery, she was three years old, highly intelligent, good-humored, and a seemingly instinctive fit with her fastidious new owners-she absolutely would not defecate on their property. She so quickly lightened everyday life that, four months after she arrived, Koontz told her he knew she was actually an angel. That provoked "the first and last time she wanted distance from me," which he doesn't interpret as confirming his suspicion, but which he does place in chapter 1 as "a spooky moment around which the entire story revolves." That story is, to be sure, another memoir of a beloved pooch, but far from just another. Besides quite regularly manifesting her extraordinariness, Trixie made Koontz ponder the nature of intelligence, interspecies communication, sympathy, intuition, love and the loyalty it engenders, and other species' degrees of consciousness, including the knowledge of personal death. Koontz leavens his musings on such weighty themes with plenty of both self-deprecating humor and Trixie's comic élan to make this one dog book that everyone other than the most flint-hearted dog-haters will deeply enjoy. Olson, Ray. From: Syndetics Solutions, Inc. Distributed by Syndetic Solutions, Inc.