The Burning Ridge
(2026)(The fifth book in the Pacific Northwest K-9 Mystery series)
A novel by Sophie Lyon
A wildfire. A body in the burn zone. An auditor everyone thinks is dead. A fortune in carbon credits sold for trees that no longer exist.
The smoke column rose over the Olympic Divide for three days before the body was found.
Siv Rolland was twenty-three years old. A junior field tech for Elwha Timber Holdings LLC. Her body was recovered in a stand the company was managing under a federal carbon-credit contract, a stand the public registry classified as preserved old-growth.
The fire is being treated as the cause of death.
Kate Soren and Scout disagree.
Sixteen months on the Olympic Peninsula, four cases behind her, and Kate has learned that the Pacific Northwest’s environmental fortunes ride on documents nobody reads. The carbon-credit registry says Stand 14-B is intact old-growth. The ground says it’s a clear-cut. Siv had photographs, GPS coordinates, internal copies. Someone wanted her silenced before she could file. The fire was the cover.
And the federal auditor everyone presumed dead in the burn zone?
She isn’t.
Liv Nordahl staged her own disappearance to protect a two-year evidence package while she made sure it reached the right federal hands. She is alive in a fire lookout tower above the smoke. She will surrender on her terms, with the documents. And Kate has thirty-six hours before the lookout is overrun by the burn line.
THE BURNING RIDGE is the fifth book in Sophie Lyon’s Pacific Northwest K-9 Mysteries — a cozy-adjacent procedural where the wildfire is real, the fraud is real, and the stakes ride on whether one woman’s documents reach the right desk before the smoke takes her notes. For fans of Margaret Mizushima, Sara Driscoll, and Paula Munier.
What readers will find:
The smoke column rose over the Olympic Divide for three days before the body was found.
Siv Rolland was twenty-three years old. A junior field tech for Elwha Timber Holdings LLC. Her body was recovered in a stand the company was managing under a federal carbon-credit contract, a stand the public registry classified as preserved old-growth.
The fire is being treated as the cause of death.
Kate Soren and Scout disagree.
Sixteen months on the Olympic Peninsula, four cases behind her, and Kate has learned that the Pacific Northwest’s environmental fortunes ride on documents nobody reads. The carbon-credit registry says Stand 14-B is intact old-growth. The ground says it’s a clear-cut. Siv had photographs, GPS coordinates, internal copies. Someone wanted her silenced before she could file. The fire was the cover.
And the federal auditor everyone presumed dead in the burn zone?
She isn’t.
Liv Nordahl staged her own disappearance to protect a two-year evidence package while she made sure it reached the right federal hands. She is alive in a fire lookout tower above the smoke. She will surrender on her terms, with the documents. And Kate has thirty-six hours before the lookout is overrun by the burn line.
THE BURNING RIDGE is the fifth book in Sophie Lyon’s Pacific Northwest K-9 Mysteries — a cozy-adjacent procedural where the wildfire is real, the fraud is real, and the stakes ride on whether one woman’s documents reach the right desk before the smoke takes her notes. For fans of Margaret Mizushima, Sara Driscoll, and Paula Munier.
What readers will find:
- A wildfire-zone procedural with no graphic violence on the page
Carbon-credit fraud rendered with full institutional realism
A whistleblower who is alive, hidden, and has been planning for two years
Real K-9 living-vs-deceased scent discrimination work
The Prescott corruption thread visibly accelerates
The dog always comes home.
One-click THE BURNING RIDGE now and read the smoke before it gets to the documents.
Genre: Cozy Mystery