A dog who won’t be claimed. A stranger who won’t take no for an answer. And a murder that refuses to stay buried.
Mara Penley thought she’d left complex systems behind when she traded a 25-year banking career for training rescue dogs in Brackenwell—but patterns have a way of finding her. When a controlled, too-perfect transfer dog arrives from Cedar Ridge, Mara recognizes the same kind of structure she used to untangle in financial records. Her Rottweiler, Rigley—once deemed unadoptable—senses it too.
Then a man storms into the shelter demanding the dog… and turns up dead minutes later.
With her reluctant ally Graham tracing suspicious financial links and Detective Pike warning her to stay out of it, Mara digs anyway—into a network moving dogs through quiet channels for profit. A territorial breeder with something to hide and a well-meaning volunteer guarding secrets both had reason to silence the victim.
But the deeper Mara looks, the clearer it becomes: this wasn’t just murder.
It was part of a system—and it’s still running.
So is Mara. And she's not the type to heel.
Genre: Mystery
Mara Penley thought she’d left complex systems behind when she traded a 25-year banking career for training rescue dogs in Brackenwell—but patterns have a way of finding her. When a controlled, too-perfect transfer dog arrives from Cedar Ridge, Mara recognizes the same kind of structure she used to untangle in financial records. Her Rottweiler, Rigley—once deemed unadoptable—senses it too.
Then a man storms into the shelter demanding the dog… and turns up dead minutes later.
With her reluctant ally Graham tracing suspicious financial links and Detective Pike warning her to stay out of it, Mara digs anyway—into a network moving dogs through quiet channels for profit. A territorial breeder with something to hide and a well-meaning volunteer guarding secrets both had reason to silence the victim.
But the deeper Mara looks, the clearer it becomes: this wasn’t just murder.
It was part of a system—and it’s still running.
So is Mara. And she's not the type to heel.
Genre: Mystery
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