The book is set in 1996 in the lead up to the Australian Federal Election of that year. Amid fear that the government of the day would soon be ousted Sandra Mahoney is contracted to write a report on administrative out-workers for the department dealing with labour issues. Soon after she starts the woman who hired Sandra, Rae Evans, is accused of fraudulently obtaining $900,000. For reasons I still can’t explain Sandra decides that Evans is not guilty and sets out to ‘investigate’ the case (if you define investigate as blunder through a series of conversations and random acts of stupidity).

I struggled with this book thought can’t really explain why. Why I didn’t throw it against a wall that is. Probably something to do with the fact it was given to me as a gift.

It’s the most confusingly convoluted plot I have come across in a very long time. It felt as if someone had laid all the book’s paragraphs out end-to-end then rearranged them randomly before sticking them back together and calling it a book. Some of the several dozen story threads seemed to end almost mid-sentence while others went on interminably but in neither case there was not much advancement in the main story. The case hinged on computer fraud which required complex explanations of hacking and other techno-babble and the parts of the story dealing with these sounded as if they’d been translated from the Martian by a drunk babel fish. When we finally got to the resolution it was a complete non-event, I could barely remember having encountered the bloke who turned out to be the bad guy although I had long since given up caring ‘whodunit’ (in fact I kept forgetting what ‘it’ was).

Another problem with the book was what I took, by the end anyway, for pretentiousness but may have been poor copy editing. I’m way more interested in politics than the average person (I remember election years the way others do World Cups or Olympics) but for the typical reader (and anyone outside this country) I can only imagine that chunks of this book, especially the first third, would make no sense at all. It’s full of obscure references to the political landscape and is peppered with acronyms that I can’t believe anyone outside the Canberra scene would have understood then let alone 13 years later.

The characters were equally difficult to come to grips with. The book is told in the first-person voice from Sandra’s point of view which should have made it a personal story but didn’t. Sandra was vague and timid most of the time which made her occasional risking of life and limb quite unbelievable. Her reason for believing in Rae Evans was only ever hinted at and never explained why she went to such lengths to find out what really happened. Not that I need to like a character to enjoy a book but when everything else is going wrong too an unlikable protagonist is one burden too many so I found Sandra’s insipidity and shoddy treatment of many of the people around her very disagreeable and when at the end of the book she decides she is going to become a computer analyst I wanted to scream “oh really, so all I have to do to get a new job is call myself an air traffic controller eh?”

Sandra’s love interest is Ivan something-Russian and he isn’t her husband (a fact which should have added far more interest to the narrative than it did) and he is a caricature of all things geek. Most of the others who features in the book are so randomly discussed or involved with the story that I didn’t form any other lasting opinions. ( )

http://www.austcrimefiction.org/node/4385 ( )

THE TROJAN DOG isn’t what could be called a traditional page-turner. The author Dorothy Johnston allows things to unfold at their own pace. We get to know the people who work with Sandra and we learn about Sandra’s life. Johnston isn’t one to spoon feed information either. Rsaders are left to make up their own minds about a few things. As a result of this, I found it took me a little time to get into the story. The tradeoff, however, is in Johnston’s writing. She uses phrases and descriptions that you find turning over in your mind and savouring.
Johnston also captures very well the lethargy overtaking a government department prior to a change of Government when in all likelihood all the jobs will be abolished. ( )

The Trojan Dog, the first of Dorothy Johnston’s Canberra quartet, is set in a Federal government in the months leading up to the 1996 election. It begins with the theft of $900,000 and the suspicions surrounding an unpopular division head called Rae Evans. Johnston’s amateur investigator, Sandra Mahoney, works for Evans, is in her debt, and convinced that she is innocent. The atmosphere of paranoia, in the waiting time before an election, is important for the story, as is the way Mahoney gradually learns some of the basics about computer crime. Published in 2000 in Australia, and in North America in 2005, The Trojan Dog was one of the first Australian novels to give electronic crime a central place.
Sandra is assisted by one of the department’s IT staff, an eccentric, shambling Russian called Ivan Semyonov, and then, as the investigation into Evans and the theft progresses, by an ACT detective sergeant with leukaemia. These three; Mahoney, Semyonov, and the policeman, DS Brook, are the trio of series characters Johnston goes on to develop in her later books.
The novel is noteworthy for its cast of mad public servants, each of whom is, in one way or another, a suspect; these include Bambi, a wordless child-woman who always wears a red cape, and Felix, another IT person, only ever encountered rushing into the department in his jogging shorts. Mahoney and Semyonov finally set a trap and catch the real thief. ( )