--- title: "Call Out The Dogs Review: Anthony Eddolls Takes Agent Stilley From a Rome Murder to the Doors of the White House" description: "Review of Call Out The Dogs, the third Special Agent David Stilley thriller by Anthony Eddolls: a Rome murder case that escalates into a political conspiracy." author: Darie Nani (Editor-in-Chief) date: 2026-09-02T11:40:07.091Z updated: 2026-09-02T11:40:40.975Z canonical: https://richbooksmagazine.com/article/call-out-the-dogs-review image: https://cdn.nanimediahouse.com/cotd-review-hero.webp categories: Thrillers, Fiction content_type: Book Review region: United States publication: Rich Books about: - type: Person name: Anthony Eddolls description: Anthony Eddolls is an independent crime fiction author and the founder of Robert Anthony Books LLC. He came to fiction after a four-decade career in finance that began on Wall Street and moved into mortgage banking. He lives and writes in Kula, on the Hawaiian island of Maui. He has published six novels across the Elliott Murphy Adventures and the Special Agent David Stilley Adventure Series, with a seventh book due in November 2026. jobTitle: Author and founder worksFor: Robert Anthony Books LLC sameAs: - https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B0BXLSY1QM - https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/1537328.Anthony_Eddolls - https://www.facebook.com/people/Anthony-Eddolls-Author/100089669482348/ - https://www.linkedin.com/in/anthonyeddolls --- Call Out The Dogs opens on a vacation, not a crime scene. FBI Special Agent in Charge David Stilley is in Rome with his wife, Patrice, and he has made up his mind to resign: the marriage matters more than the Bureau, and he intends to say so. He gets as far as the decision. Two Americans are dead, one in London and one in Rome, killed with the same weapon, and the call that interrupts his vacation pulls him into the case that will decide the question of his career for him. ### Book: Call Out The Dogs *The Special Agent David Stilley Adventure Series, Book Three* By Anthony Eddolls When Special Agent in Charge David Stilley answers a call in Rome, he expects a routine liaison, until he learns a consular official was murdered with the same weapon used to kill an American banker in London. Pulled into a three-nation manhunt from Milan to Dover, Stilley uncovers a pattern of professional hits pointing at a covert program whose exposure could topple an administration, and must decide whether justice is a public reckoning or a private bargain. [Amazon Kindle](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0H44ZM4RQ) That setup gives Anthony Eddolls's third David Stilley adventure its particular shape: a procedural that keeps escalating. What begins as ballistics matching across two capitals grows into a three-nation manhunt, and the pattern behind the victims is too clinical to be random: professional hits, identical casings, and a level of resource behind them that no lone killer commands. The closer Stilley gets to what connects the dead, the clearer it becomes that someone is willing to spend heavily to keep it hidden. Eddolls moves the chase from Rome to Milan to London to Dover in forty-nine short chapters, and the brevity is what keeps the pace high. Scenes arrive, do their work and hand over to the next one; the effect is closer to a screen thriller than a slow-burn procedural, and it suits the compressed timeline, which packs the whole investigation into a matter of days. The story is told in Stilley's first person, with occasional cutaways to the assassin, a disillusioned ex-SAS sniper whose chapters supply the view from the other end of the scope. The tradecraft is a pleasure in its specificity. A technician's video manhunt "searched two days before each time of death, and an hour afterward." Burner phones are bought, tracked and burned. A protection detail argues about hospital security in credible detail, and when the hunt tightens on the Kent coast, the geography of ports and safe flats is concrete enough to navigate by. Eddolls's years around high-stakes deal-making show in [the way money moves through the plot](https://richbooksmagazine.com/article/the-vault-from-the-author-who-knows-where-the-bodies-are-buried-whirls-wall-street-secrets-in): the investment structures, the pressure on the principals, the sense that every meeting has a price attached. The title arrives in dialogue, when Stilley decides the case needs more than investigators: "One thing I know for sure is that we need Commander Ingram to call out the dogs!" The Dogs are an elite MI-5 tactical unit, and their commander, the dry-witted Jeremy Ingram, is the best of the supporting cast, a transatlantic partnership that gives the second half of the book both its firepower and much of its humor. Behind the manhunt sits the book's most ambitious swing. The evidence points toward a covert program whose exposure would topple an administration, and the second half of the novel plays out in the space between justice done in the open and justice done off the record. Eddolls has said he wrote the book because the premise would have seemed unrealistic fifteen years ago, and readers will feel the charge of the present in it; the novel keeps its politics inside the story, but it is not shy about how power protects itself. There is also, unexpectedly for the genre, a hopeful strand about artificial intelligence: where most thrillers cast AI as the menace, this one imagines it as something worth protecting. Through all of it runs the thread that opened the book: the question of what Stilley owes his marriage and what he owes the badge, asked in the opening pages and left genuinely open until the last. It is answered, and the answer sets the series on a new course, but that belongs to the reader. New readers can walk in here without having read the earlier books, since the case stands entirely on its own. Call Out The Dogs is the strongest expression yet of what Eddolls has been building across the Stilley series: investigations with international scope, characters as flawed as they are capable, and a conviction that the deals made behind closed doors are where the real danger lives. Readers of contemporary crime and [espionage fiction](https://richbooksmagazine.com/article/cold-war-lessons-for-corporate-warriors-cia-s-human-cost-in-code-name-boulder-creek) in the Daniel Silva and David Baldacci tradition will find familiar terrain here, delivered at a pace that makes 440 pages feel considerably shorter. It earns its place as the most charged and most confident book in the series. ### More From Anthony Eddolls - [Crossing Over](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C54CC22S) by Anthony Eddolls - [The Lines We Cross](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C54D69DF) by Anthony Eddolls - [The Final Cross](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C6C9GGBB) by Anthony Eddolls - [The Beast Within Us](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CY7S1TKN) by Anthony Eddolls - [The Sleeper Among Us](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0H678RZ3G) by Anthony Eddolls **About Anthony Eddolls** Author and founder, Robert Anthony Books LLC Anthony Eddolls is an independent crime fiction author and the founder of Robert Anthony Books LLC. He came to fiction after a four-decade career in finance that began on Wall Street and moved into mortgage banking. He lives and writes in Kula, on the Hawaiian island of Maui. He has published six novels across the Elliott Murphy Adventures and the Special Agent David Stilley Adventure Series, with a seventh book due in November 2026. ## FAQ **Q: Can Call Out The Dogs be read as a standalone novel?** Yes. It is the third book in the Special Agent David Stilley series, but the case is self-contained and the book introduces its characters cleanly. Readers who start here can go back to The Beast Within Us and The Sleeper Among Us afterwards. **Q: What order should the David Stilley books be read in?** Publication order: The Beast Within Us (2024), The Sleeper Among Us and Call Out The Dogs (both 2026). The series follows on from the author's completed three-book Elliott Murphy trilogy, which begins with Crossing Over. **Q: Is there a sequel to Call Out The Dogs?** The ending sets up a new direction for David Stilley, and Anthony Eddolls has announced a seventh book for November 2026.