The Deep Green: Pacific Northwest K-9 Mysteries, Book 1
About The Deep Green: Pacific Northwest K-9 Mysteries, Book 1
The forest knows what the satellites can't see. Kate Soren came home to start over. Four years at Seattle's Innocence Project ended in a loss she couldn't carry alone.
She drove east to a mountain town called Elk Creek, Colorado, and learned a new trade from a K-9 trainer named Gemma Hartley-Reyes. Two years later she drove back into Washington with a working-line German Shepherd named Scout, a rented cottage on the harbor, and a job title nobody on the Olympic Peninsula had asked for: search-and-rescue K-9 handler. Her first case is supposed to be simple.
Wildlife biologist Wren Bergstrom walked into the Hoh Rain Forest on a backcountry permit to study elk. She never walked out. The Park Service is running it as a lost hiker.
The county sheriff is running it as a search. Kate is running it as the case that will tell her whether she belongs here or whether she should pack the truck and drive back to the Rockies. Then Scout alerts on scent fifteen feet above the ground.
Under a canopy where aerial search is useless and GPS dies at the overstory, the Hoh has been hiding something. It has also been recording it, in the nurse logs, in the duff, in the migration route of the elk themselves. The rain that destroys Kate's evidence is the same rain preserving Scout's.
Wren isn't lost. She isn't dead. She is days into a captivity she has been documenting from the inside: pressed samples, timed observations, mapped escape routes, a field notebook built like a deposition.
Kate isn't arriving to rescue her. Kate is arriving to finish what Wren already started. And the man who took her is the third generation of his family to walk these drainages, and he does not believe he is the criminal in this story.
THE DEEP GREEN is the first book in an eight-book arc, the opening arc of Sophie Lyon's planned twenty-four-book Pacific Northwest K-9 Mysteries: former Innocence Project attorney Kate Soren and her German Shepherd Scout, building a search-and-rescue program from nothing on Washington's Olympic Peninsula. For readers of Margaret Mizushima's Timber Creek K-9 Mysteries, Paula Munier's Mercy and Elvis novels, and Dana Stabenow's wilderness procedurals. What you'll find inside:A complete standalone case, a clean entry point to a long seriesA quietly competent woman who gets quieter under pressureReal K-9 scent work on the page, doing things you have not seen a dog do in fictionThe Hoh Rain Forest as a co-protagonist, not a backdropNo graphic on-page violence, the violence is off-page, the aftermath is the storyThe dog survives.
Always. If you have ever wanted a mystery that smells like cedar and rain, where the forest is a character and the dog gets there first, start here.