She has other issues too.Â Twenty percent of puppies die during training.Â A charming gangster who is new in town and his entourage decide to move into her boarding house.Â Her childhood best friend has married into a crime lord’s family and now her son was murdered. She uses this information to find out about two crime sprees going on under the noses of the Dogs. This book reads more like a crime story than typical fantasy.Â There are fantasy elements.Â It is set in a fictional world with its own unique idioms and cultures.Â There is magic.Â But those things are secondary to the story being told.īeka is a police trainee.Â Real police are known as Dogs and trainees are Puppies.Â She is assigned to a rough part of the city by request and is partnered with a well known team of Dogs.Â She wants to be here because she comes from these streets.Â As a child she helped the Provost with a tip on a crime gang and when he went to thank her he found her living with her terminally ill mother and her younger siblings.Â He took the family into his household.Â Now her siblings are growing up with aspirations of a better life than Beka could have ever imagined for them but she is afraid that they are ashamed of her and where they came from.īeka is also magical.Â She can hear the ghosts that ride on the backs of pigeons.Â She can hear the snippets of conversation that get caught up in wind swirls in city corners.Â She has a feline companion named Pounce who may or may not be a God.

I’m not sure what I was expecting.Â Fantasy?Â YA?Â Whatever it was, it wasn’t this. Recently I’ve been seeing posts singing the praises of Tamora Pierce.Â I had to admit that I had never heard of her even though she written a gazillion books.Â (There are 79 distinct works listed on Goodreads.)Â I decided to give her a try and Terrier was an available ebook on my library’s website. So good, in fact, that she hears things that Mattes and Clary never could - information that is passed in murmurs when flocks of pigeons gather. Never much of a talker, Beka is a good listener. What they don't know is that Beka has something unique to offer. They're tough, they're capable, and they're none too happy about the indignity of being saddled with a puppy for the first time in years. She's assigned to work with Mattes and Clary, famed veterans among the Provost's Dogs. But it's also where Beka was born, and she's comfortable there.īeka gets her wish.

To the surprise of both the veteran 'Dogs' and her fellow 'puppies,' Beka requests duty in the Lower City. Terrier (Beka Cooper, #1)by Tamora Pierceīeka Cooper is a rookie with the law-enforcing Provost's Guard, commonly known as 'the Provost's Dogs,' in Corus, the capital city of Tortall.

Terrier the legend of beka cooper 1