Riley MarshK-9 Search & Rescue Mysteries

When a retired schoolteacher goes missing above a small Cascades town in the first cold rain of October, Riley stands at a trail junction at one in the morning and works out exactly where the woman is, and exactly why no one will believe her. Command draws the search circle from a neighbor's statement. The circle is wrong. Riley has no way to prove it.

Two weeks later, at a guide-dog school's career-change day in Oregon, a fourteen-month-old chocolate Lab ignores every person in the yard, works the fence line nose-down, and brings her a wool glove she didn't know she'd dropped. His file says excessive environmental sniffing. His puppy raiser, who is twelve and certain he failed, hands her a chewed orange canvas duck and makes her promise it stays with the dog.

She names him Huckleberry.

The Washout is the story of Riley and Huck's first winter: the runaways in the rain, the alert nobody taught him, a camera under five months of moss, and the small human lie sitting six hours upstream of a woman who should have lived. It ends the morning a boy goes missing ahead of a thunderstorm, and a dog who isn't certified yet has to be right the first time.

It's also the only place you'll ever find out where the duck came from.

A complete 30,000-word prequel novella to the Riley Marsh K-9 Search & Rescue Mysteries. Free, and not available anywhere else.

This time it's Emmett Pruett, a local man, found dead on the slope above his wrecked snowmobile.

The county calls it an accident. Bad ice, bad luck, a rider off a groomed trail on the worst night of the winter.

Riley Marsh disagrees.

A man who freezes to death melts himself a bed in the snow. Emmett is lying on top of it. And nobody in Copper Falls pays cash for a twenty-thousand-dollar snowmobile, but Emmett did.

Six months home, in a town still sore about the last thing she found, Riley won't let it go, and Sheriff Simon Brennan quietly keeps the file open. But a hunch won't change a ruling. She needs proof, so she takes the dog back up the mountain.

Up there, Huck finds enough to keep her asking. And in a place this small, asking questions about one neighbor means asking questions about everyone. The town isn't afraid she's wrong. It's afraid she's right.

Meanwhile, the file on her brother's search has been sitting unopened on her kitchen table since November. This winter, she runs out of reasons not to open it.

Then Jordan Pike, an outdoors star followed by millions online, heads into the mountains alone and doesn’t come back.

Everything points to Tamarack Lakes: his post, the missing page from his atlas, the trail register.

Everything except Huck.

When Huck finally leads her to Jordan, the coroner calls his death an accident. A fall from a rock high above the valley, exactly the kind of place Jordan made his name standing too close to the edge.

Riley Marsh disagrees.

Jordan’s camera is missing. So is his phone. And when Huck follows another scent away from the place Jordan fell, it leads down the back of the mountain to a road nobody should have been using.

Somebody else was up there.

To prove it, Riley will have to get past a stranger from Ohio with a long lens and a lie about where he was, a video the whole internet has already watched, and one person who knew Jordan well enough to make millions of strangers believe the wrong story.

Meanwhile, another missing page is waiting for Riley in Copper Falls.

This one disappeared twelve years ago, during the search for her brother.

• A complete standalone mystery, with Riley’s long-running search for her brother continuing underneath
• Real K-9 search work: scent articles, trailing, article search, and a dog who keeps telling the truth
• A missing outdoors star, a mountain full of conflicting evidence, and a search sent the wrong way
• The slow-burn sheriff and a standing Tuesday coffee at the Copper Kettle
• A small Montana town suddenly watched by millions
• No graphic on-page violence. The crime is off-page; the aftermath is the story.
• The dog always comes home.

Then the headliner, Nicky Brand, the valley's own star, walks off before her last song. She leaves her phone on her trailer floor, and as the crowds drive away, Riley and Huck follow her trail into the dark.

All night they search the airless river bottoms. At first light Huck finds her on a gravel bar three miles downriver, barely conscious but alive. Three days later she is dead, and the doctors blame the heat.

Riley Marsh disagrees.

Riley held Nicky in the river at dawn, hours after sunset, and she was still burning up with a fever the cold water couldn't touch. Nobody else was there to feel it.

With Sheriff Simon Brennan quietly keeping the file open, Riley takes Huck back over Nicky's long night, and the trail tells a different story from the one the town believes. But who in her own hometown would want Nicky Brand dead?

And in the fort she and her brother built as kids, Riley finds something he hid the year he vanished. Every page is in his handwriting. She can't read a word of it.

For four days, as the first snow closes in, every team in the valley searches and finds nothing. When the people in charge want to call it off, Riley keeps going with Huck, until he sits and stares: the signal for the dead.

Riley braces for the worst, but the bones they dig up are old, in freshly turned earth, and not Lorna's.

The next day Lorna is found alive and says she got lost in the storm. The county calls it two sad accidents: hers, and an old hiker's.

Riley Marsh disagrees.

No woman walks into a storm and leaves her dog behind. She's sure Lorna didn't get lost at all: she ran, terrified of someone, and whoever it was is still out there. With Sheriff Simon Brennan beside her, Riley has to find them before they find Lorna again.

She is determined to give the bones a name and bring them home to rest. But one question keeps her awake: her brother vanished in these mountains thirteen years ago. Are they his?

At Lorna's window, Riley sees the mountains exactly as her brother once drew them. For thirteen years she has searched for a boy who got lost. What if he never was?

The county calls it a wandering-off. A stranger, unwell, in deep cold. Sad, and ordinary.

Riley Marsh disagrees.

A man who walks the same road for eight straight mornings isn't wandering. He's waiting for something on it. And a man who arrives with no story is usually carrying one.

A year and a half home, Riley works it with Sheriff Simon Brennan, and the stranger doesn't stay a stranger for long. Somebody in Copper Falls knew why he came. In a town this small, that means someone Riley has known her whole life has been keeping a secret for years.

And in the lining of a suitcase nobody will claim, she finds something that belongs to her own story, and has no business being there.

The county calls it an accident, the kind that happens when a town is cut off, scared, and doing too much at once.

Riley Marsh disagrees.

Panic makes people careless. Whoever did this was careful.

Nearly two years home, Riley knows a fixed suspect pool when she's standing in one. There's no lab, no coroner, and no help coming up the road, so for four days she and Sheriff Simon Brennan are the whole investigation. Whoever did this is still in the valley, and so is everyone who could prove it.

And then the man who taught Riley to read ground when she was sixteen stops answering his phone. When he finally opens his door, it isn't to talk about the slide.

It's the conversation she's wanted since the day she came home. She isn't ready for it.

The county calls it a cardiac event. The family flies him home. The lodge books its next wedding.

Riley Marsh disagrees.

A hundred and forty alibis is too many. When everyone is watching the same thing, nobody is watching anyone. And a man who marries strangers for a living learns things about them.

Two years home, Riley knows what a room looks like when it has agreed on a story. She and Sheriff Simon Brennan have a guest list, eleven minutes, and a lodge full of people who would rather remember the vows. Half the county was at that wedding, and every question she asks lands on a family she's known her whole life, on the happiest day of somebody's year.

Meanwhile, the question Riley has carried since the day she came home finally has a name for an answer.

It's a name she has known her whole life.

The county calls it natural causes.

Riley Marsh disagrees.

Four days before a deposition isn't a coincidence. It's a deadline.

This time, she's nearly alone. Half the town thinks she cost the county a good man's name, and the other half won't say what it thinks in public. Sheriff Simon Brennan is taking professional damage for standing beside her, and the rival who once filed a complaint against her is burning his own standing to keep her in the field.

Then the county's dispatcher of forty-one years brings a shoebox to the barn, full of things she's kept since 2014.

And in a box of papers from a house sale two counties north is an envelope with Riley's name on it. It was never mailed. Whoever wrote it knew exactly where to find her.

The county says it's over. Copper Falls has a spring to get on with.

Riley Marsh disagrees.

A search isn't over when somebody calls it. It's over when you know.

So Riley runs the last search the way she's run every other one: grid it, work it, believe the dog. Her chocolate Lab, Huck, is retired now, gray to the eyebrows, and comes anyway, because nobody has ever successfully told him not to. Lucy takes the lead. Sheriff Simon Brennan, engaged to Riley since the fall, drives.

The trail goes north, out of the county, past the last place anyone looked.

To a cabin at the end of a road, and a door Riley has been walking toward for fourteen years.