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Tamora Pierce begins a new Tortall trilogy introducing Beka Cooper, an amazing young woman who lived 200 years before Pierce's popular Alanna character. For the very first time, Pierce employs first-person narration in a novel, bringing readers even closer to a character that they will love for her unusual talents and tough personality.
Beka Cooper is a rookie with the law-enforcing Provost's Guard, and she's been assigned to the Lower City. It's a tough beat that's about to get tougher, as Beka's limited ability to communicate with the dead clues her in to an underworld conspiracy. Someone close to Beka is using dark magic to profit from the Lower City's criminal enterprises--and the result is a crime wave the likes of which the Provost's Guard has never seen before.
Amazon.com Review:
Tamora Pierce has been creating strong, appealing heroines for teen fantasy fans for years, creating 2 main universes to house her multiple series. With Terrier, Pierce returns to the Tortall universe (home to her Song of the Lioness, Immortals, Protector of the Small, and Daughter of the Lioness series). Want to learn more? Read an exclusive essay from Tamora Pierce below. --Daphne Durham
An Essay from Tamora Pierce
Sixteen-year-old Beka Cooper lives far removed from knights, palaces, and the nobility. Her world revolves around thieves, beggars, taverns, and the lowest of the low. She's a trainee for the Provost's Guard—a rookie cop, in a world where a cop makes her own name based on her personality, her attitude toward money, and her love of the law. Beka means to prove that she is out to make her mark in this hard and physical world.
She does face a large obstacle. She's shy. Painfully shy. Left to her own devices, she would have no friends. It's hard for her to talk to people she doesn't know. It's a problem for the Guards who train her, a real problem for Beka—unless she can figure out that a uniform is a kind of costume, one she can hide behind. One that will make her a more outspoken person. It will help a lot if people come to realize that under her shyness is a clever, determined young woman. It will help even more if she can make friends who can give her good advice. Luckily, she has one such friend living with her in her slum apartment: a purple-eyed grey cat named Pounce. He can make himself understood in human speech if he wishes to. He's capable of doing weirdly intelligent things to help his young companion Beka. With Pounce to assist her, Beka cannot have an ordinary career.
Beka tells her own story in a journal that she keeps from her very very first day as a Puppy. The Guards are dubbed 'Dogs' in her time and their trainees are called 'Puppies.' In its pages she writes of her days with her training Dogs, the pair who are to teach her what they know of survival on the streets in the city's toughest slum. Both are veterans. Tunstall is an easygoing, funny man who can be a little crazy in a fight. Goodwin is a small, tough woman who is opposed to Beka's presence at the beginning, a hard Dog and a smart one. They take charge when Beka brings them word of two vicious sets of crimes. Like everyone else in Beka's life, her partners find out that once Beka gets a case in her teeth, she hangs onto it like a terrier until it's been solved.
I have all kinds of reasons why I went to the past of the Alanna books. In part I wanted to show how present-day Tortall came to be. I also knew George's fans would welcome any kind of return to the Lower City, even if it wasn't the Lower City of his time. I wanted to get away from the courts and nobility, the setting for so many of the Tortall books thus far. Since I didn't want to show any of the characters I've come to love as being old or even dead, I couldn't write books in the future of the current Tortall. I turned to the past, and I'm pretty sure my readers will be glad I did! --Tamora Pierce
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Rated by buyers 
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I read this book in anticipation of giving it to my (just turned 14) Grand daughter....Let me say that I am in my 60's and have never read a Tamora Pierce book and will probably never read one again. I am surprised at how many 5 star reviews this book obtained. In light of the book being recommended for 7th grade and up, I cannot give it a good review. It seemed odd to me that the author on one hand tried to keep the story at a 7th grade and up level, but at the same time had content about baby killing, slave trading and parents selling their kids for money. I was able to get through all of that until I reached page no.442. The evil Crookshank tells our 16 yr. old heroine, Beka: " his eyes buldged. I'll see you raped and your body left in a midden, your throat cut in two."
At that point I should have thrown the book in the trash, because that is all it is.....
Rated by buyers -
I've read 13 of Pierce's books over the last ten years. Some I've even read about a dozen times. I started in grade school and loved them all they way till now. Like most, I couldn't wait for the new book to come out. A time before the Lioness's time...it sounded awesome.
It sounded awesome. I managed to get a 1/3 of the way through before giving it up. The style had me lost and it was all around interesting. Nothing close to her pervious work. I've been told "Oh, your just attached to her other characters," not true. I've read other books where I adore the characters but also loved reading about the time that came before them once prequels were made. Others say "Perhaps your just too old and have grown out of them." You never are two old to pick up a book intended for somebody younger. The very first place I go to in a book store is the picture books.
No, this book was just an all-around disappointment.
Rated by buyers 
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Someone else has already said exactly what I felt so I will copy it here.
"I have been a fan of Pierce's books, the Tortall series in particular, for over a decade, but I was disappointed by Terrier. The setting was interesting, as were parts of the story and some of characters, but it was not taken advantage of like it could have been."
I didn't mind the journal type of the book but I did feel let down by this book. I couldn't connect with Beka and I just didn't care about the world she was living in. I never laughed or cried and my heart never stopped or did a pitapat as it did with the Song of the Lioness books or any of her others. :(
The concept of a strong female character in Georges background excited me and could of been great. But was only difficult to get through and boring.
Rated by buyers 
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I thoroughly enjoyed reading Beka Cooper. Tamora Pierce is an exceptional author, who is categorized as a "Teen" author. I probably would have never stumbled upon her books unless a friend had recommended them. So let that be a lesson, while it's classified as Teen they are in my humble opinion excellent books none the less. Remember the phrase "Never judge a book by its cover." Be sure to remember this as well when it comes to sections/genres you don't often look at or give a second thought to. Well written & I recommend all her other books.
Rated by buyers 
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...that, several years ago, i wandered into the "Teen" section at B&N and noticed a series of YA books with the intriguing overall title "Protector of the Small". (Actually, i didn't "wander in" - i've made it a habit to check the "Teen" and "Children's" sections for years; amazing what gems you can find there.)
Once upon a time, "adventure books for girls" often seemed either condescending ("Girls can't *really* have adventures on their own, but here's a story to stop you nagging us about it") or more-or-less strident feminist tracts ("Grrls CAN TOO have adventures, and they're BETTER than stinky boys, too - nyahh!"). That began to change a while ago - Robin McKinley's "The Blue Sword" and "The Hero and the Crown" being examples - and lately there's a lot of excellent juvenile adventure fiction which (whatever agendas the authors may privately hold to) are just goos stories that hapen to have female protagonists, and the books of Tamora Pierce are excellent examples.
Here Ms Pierce goes back into Tortall's history to show us George Cooper's ancestor Beka as she begins her service with the Dogs (the capital city's law-enforcement group).
The Dogs are very like the Bow Street Runners of 18th Century London (though the Runners did not orginally patrol the streets); semiofficial law-enforcement agents who were allowed (even expected) to accept private commissions and to accept "clean" bribes to supplement their meagre funding.
Beka is a scrambler who refuses to back down even in the face of (apparently) overwhelming odds; in addition, she has a more-or-less minor magical Talent that allows her to hear the voices of the recently-dead (carried by pigeons, who are the lack God's messengers), and to interact with dust whirls, which are apparently semi-sentient spirit beings that manifest as permanent dust devils on streets and corners and hear and repeat to her everything that goes on in their area.
As an advisor/confidante/when-needed-ego-deflator, she has Pounce, a violet-eyed cat who talks, when he feels like it and only to those he wants to understand him. Previous readers of Ms Pierce's "Alanna" books will not be surprised to hear that there is a constellation missing from the heavens...
As an eight-year-old street kid, Beka tracked down and turned in a criminal gang the Dogs couldn't find - because one of its members was her mother's man who kicked her out when she developed chronic lung disease (either TB or cancer; the descripton is a touch vague). As a result, she and her brothers and sisters and mother were taken into the household of the Lord Provost, who commands the Dogs.
As a "Puppy" (first year novice Dog), Beka makes friends on both sides of the law - some who are obviously destined to rise high in the Court of the Rogue, and some who are just as obvously destined to be famous Dogs.
This book's main plotlines center around two somewhat interlinking series of events - mysterious disappearances of people seeking work and the depradations of a nasty kidnapper/extortionist who calls him/herself the "Shadow Snake" after a bogey mothers use to threaten naughty children with.
But there are a lot of other events to carry the reader's interest for 500+ pages, including Beka's adventures as a working Dog, the afore-mentioned cast of charactgers on both sides of the law (particularly swordsman Rosto the Piper and his two sometime girlfriends, the Lady Knight Sabine [i wish Alanna and Keladry could eet her] and Beka's training-master Dogs, Goodwin and Tunstall), and the increasingly rich picture of the capital of Tortall.
While this book *is* part of an ongoing mega-series, it's not directly tied to any of the previous books (in fact, it's set hundreds of years earlier), and gives the reader everything necessary to understand and enjoy what's going on.
An excellent jumping-on place for Pierce's work as a whole; i give it four stars rather than five in comparison to the very best of Ms Pierce's own work - the "Trickster" books, featuring Beka's descendant, Alliana of Pirate's Swoop, for instance.
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