The Final Grid
(2026)(The fifth book in the Riley Marsh K-9 Search & Rescue Mystery series)
A novel by Mara Perry
Nine counties, twenty-two dogs, one judge dead in a rig that was sound the night before.
You cannot sabotage a search. Everyone in the valley believes that. It's practically a prayer.
The Northern Rockies Regional SAR Trials come to Copper Falls in October, which means the fairgrounds full of trailers, the barn scrubbed to a shine nobody has seen in thirty years, and every handler between here and Spokane watching the new woman run the county's K-9 unit. Riley Marsh has spent a month telling herself she doesn't care how it looks.
Then a certification judge is found on the second morning, in the equipment rig, under a load that had no business coming down.
The trials committee calls it a rigging failure. The insurer agrees. The competition continues, because it has to.
Riley Marsh disagrees.
A year back in Copper Falls, four cases behind her and a life she has stopped calling temporary, Riley knows exactly how much of SAR runs on trust: you get in a stranger's truck, you take a stranger's grid assignment, you believe the map you were handed. Somebody in this valley figured out that the trust is the weak point — and used it in front of two hundred witnesses.
Working it means suspecting her own people. It means Amos Teller's certification records, Vance Kellerman's borrowed gear, and a grid sheet with a correction on it in handwriting she has seen before.
And in the two weeks it takes her to get there, her brother's coded notebook gives up its first clean page.
Danny wasn't writing a trail journal.
THE FINAL GRID is the fifth book in the Riley Marsh K-9 Search & Rescue Mysteries, a cozy-adjacent K-9 procedural set in the Montana high country, and the midpoint of a ten-book arc. For fans of Sophie Lyon's K-9 Search & Rescue Mysteries, Margaret Mizushima's Timber Creek novels, and Nevada Barr.
What readers will find:
You cannot sabotage a search. Everyone in the valley believes that. It's practically a prayer.
The Northern Rockies Regional SAR Trials come to Copper Falls in October, which means the fairgrounds full of trailers, the barn scrubbed to a shine nobody has seen in thirty years, and every handler between here and Spokane watching the new woman run the county's K-9 unit. Riley Marsh has spent a month telling herself she doesn't care how it looks.
Then a certification judge is found on the second morning, in the equipment rig, under a load that had no business coming down.
The trials committee calls it a rigging failure. The insurer agrees. The competition continues, because it has to.
Riley Marsh disagrees.
A year back in Copper Falls, four cases behind her and a life she has stopped calling temporary, Riley knows exactly how much of SAR runs on trust: you get in a stranger's truck, you take a stranger's grid assignment, you believe the map you were handed. Somebody in this valley figured out that the trust is the weak point — and used it in front of two hundred witnesses.
Working it means suspecting her own people. It means Amos Teller's certification records, Vance Kellerman's borrowed gear, and a grid sheet with a correction on it in handwriting she has seen before.
And in the two weeks it takes her to get there, her brother's coded notebook gives up its first clean page.
Danny wasn't writing a trail journal.
THE FINAL GRID is the fifth book in the Riley Marsh K-9 Search & Rescue Mysteries, a cozy-adjacent K-9 procedural set in the Montana high country, and the midpoint of a ten-book arc. For fans of Sophie Lyon's K-9 Search & Rescue Mysteries, Margaret Mizushima's Timber Creek novels, and Nevada Barr.
What readers will find:
- A complete standalone mystery with the widest suspect pool in the series
Competitive SAR from the inside: certification standards, blind problems, and what handlers do to each other when they're being watched
A first kiss that complicates everything immediately
A dog past his prime working years and a vet visit Riley doesn't want to schedule
No graphic on-page violence — the crime is off-page; the aftermath is the story
The dog always comes home.
If you love a fair-play mystery among people who all know how to hide a body properly and choose not to, one-click THE FINAL GRID now and follow the dog.
Genre: Mystery