Owner of an elegant dog-grooming salon by day, Grim spends his free hours crisscrossing the streets of East St. Louis in an unheated lime-green VW bus. Everywhere, he sees dogs: feral, hobbled, mangy, flea-scarred, panicked, desperately alone or glued to a starving pack. When Melinda Roth, an experienced political reporter, accompanies him, she sees the societal context, the economic causes, the human subtext. Grim sees only the dogs.

Most people would run away from such dogs. He chases them.

Roth starts out annoyed, quizzing Grim about why he cares so much about the dogs and not the human beings around them. From there she moves to reluctantly helping him, then rescuing dogs herself, then learning everything she can about them. With warmth, intelligence and lyrical detail, she shows us how Grim manages the stray rescues he’s now famous for. She sets scenes with such sensory vividness we can feel the cold, see the rubble. She documents the delicacy and determination of Grim’s methods, and we hold our breath as we read, willing the trust that will make a rescue possible.

Using humor to melt resistance and guilt, Roth gives these helpless castoff dogs power over us. She lifts the veil of denial and pulls every heartstring—without turning maudlin. Sometimes the balance comes at Grim’s expense, as she emphasizes the rescuer’s wry obsession and belabors his anxious vulnerability. Yet the theme stays poignant, because only during Grim’s encounters with dogs— wild, unsure, needing him absolutely—can he forget his own fears. The unexpected trade—kindness for healing—carries a magic years of psychotherapy could never reproduce.

The book might be even stronger, dramatically speaking, if it kept to a single point of view, instead of beginning with Roth’s detached observations, jumping into Grim’s consciousness, sliding back out to see him as others do and occasionally trying to pro-ject the dogs’ inner experiences. Still, the insights add rather than distract. It is impossible to read this book and not gain a visceral sense of what these dogs experience, what Grim experiences and what needs to change in society. The research Roth splices between episodes provides coolly necessary facts—the only danger being that the “story” sections are so engaging, and so different in tone, that it’s tempting to skim the data.

Dog-ear the pages.

Then return to the less didactic sections, where we learn just as much, tacitly, about the structure of dog packs, the canine rituals of aggression and dominance, the differences and similarities between canine and human fear. There’s more life-and-death drama here than on TV, and the crimes are shadowy, lurking at the margins, normally invisible to all but the poor and the foolhardy.

Roth writes skillfully, drawing out the natural suspense in each dog’s story and braiding the tales into one another. Yet the book remains episodic; it does not build to a grand resolution, or even reach a simple, satisfying closure. There is no closure to this problem. Every year, more feral dogs haunt America’s urban wastelands. Millions of strays are caught and euthanized. Many times that number stay on the run, hungry or hurt, waiting for somebody who’s crazy enough to save them—and sane enough to know there’ll be no end to it.