The River House
(2026)(The third book in the Pacific Northwest K-9 Mystery series)
A novel by Sophie Lyon
The river doesn’t lie. It just takes.
A father and two children vanished from a riverside cabin during the worst flood in a decade.
The Queets is at glacial flood stage. The cabin is half-submerged. The mother, Maiken Sund, was in Seattle for work when the call came. Search teams have been on the water for twelve hours and recovered nothing but a child’s shoe in a debris snag downstream.
The Park Service is calling it a tragedy.
Kate Soren is calling it something else.
Eight months on the Olympic Peninsula, two cases behind her, and Kate has learned to trust the chemistry the rain forest preserves and the coast erases. Now she’s learning what the river does. The Queets is glacial-fed, mineral-laden, dense, cold. It deposits as much as it carries away. And when Scout works the bank above the cabin, the dog leads them not toward the water but uphill, away from it. Away from where a flood would take a family. Toward a small cairn an eight-year-old left because her father taught her wilderness safety, and she thought they were on an adventure.
Astrid Lofgren is leaving a trail.
She doesn’t know she’s been kidnapped.
And the man with the children is the man who loves them most in the world and is wrong about everything.
THE RIVER HOUSE is the third book in Sophie Lyon'''s Pacific Northwest K-9 Mysteries. A standalone glacial-river mystery in an eight-environment Arc One. For fans of Margaret Mizushima’s Timber Creek series and Paula Munier’s wilderness procedurals.
What readers will find:
A father and two children vanished from a riverside cabin during the worst flood in a decade.
The Queets is at glacial flood stage. The cabin is half-submerged. The mother, Maiken Sund, was in Seattle for work when the call came. Search teams have been on the water for twelve hours and recovered nothing but a child’s shoe in a debris snag downstream.
The Park Service is calling it a tragedy.
Kate Soren is calling it something else.
Eight months on the Olympic Peninsula, two cases behind her, and Kate has learned to trust the chemistry the rain forest preserves and the coast erases. Now she’s learning what the river does. The Queets is glacial-fed, mineral-laden, dense, cold. It deposits as much as it carries away. And when Scout works the bank above the cabin, the dog leads them not toward the water but uphill, away from it. Away from where a flood would take a family. Toward a small cairn an eight-year-old left because her father taught her wilderness safety, and she thought they were on an adventure.
Astrid Lofgren is leaving a trail.
She doesn’t know she’s been kidnapped.
And the man with the children is the man who loves them most in the world and is wrong about everything.
THE RIVER HOUSE is the third book in Sophie Lyon'''s Pacific Northwest K-9 Mysteries. A standalone glacial-river mystery in an eight-environment Arc One. For fans of Margaret Mizushima’s Timber Creek series and Paula Munier’s wilderness procedurals.
What readers will find:
- A winter procedural with the Queets River as co-antagonist
An eight-year-old’s trail markers as the case’s beating heart
A staged crime scene undone by glacial chemistry
The mentor-student dynamic deepens, Kate trains a young handler in real time
No graphic on-page violence. Cozy contract honored.
The dog always comes home.
The flood is a calendar. Someone read it correctly. Someone else read it wrong.
One-click THE RIVER HOUSE now and follow the cairns.
Genre: Cozy Mystery