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The Giving Ground
(2027)(The seventh book in the Riley Marsh K-9 Search & Rescue Mystery series)
A novel by Mara Perry
A slope lets go in April.
Under it: a truck nobody reported stolen, and a man nobody reported missing.
The mountains around Copper Falls take things. Once a decade or so, in the wet spring, they hand something back.
The slide comes down across the Coldwater Road switchbacks on the second Tuesday of April and takes out four hundred feet of hillside. It also takes out whatever the hillside had been sitting on for eleven years — a pickup, nose down, doors shut, and a driver still behind the wheel.
There is no missing-person report. There is no stolen-vehicle report. There is no name in this county that anyone has been waiting on.
The state calls it a recovery, not an investigation. A truck went off a road a long time ago; the road has been rebuilt twice since.
Riley Marsh disagrees.
Eighteen months back in Copper Falls, six cases behind her, engaged to nothing and settled anyway, Riley knows that a man who goes into a drainage and isn't missed was arranged not to be missed. Somebody made calls. Somebody explained an absence. In a town of 2,847, somebody is still explaining it.
And then Amos Teller — seventy-two, red suspenders, thirty years running this county's search unit, the man who taught Riley scent work when she was sixteen — stops answering his phone.
When he finally opens the door, he has something to tell her about October 2014.
She has wanted it for seven books. She is not ready for it.
THE GIVING GROUND is the seventh book in the Riley Marsh K-9 Search & Rescue Mysteries, a cozy-adjacent K-9 procedural set in the Montana high country. For fans of Sophie Lyon's K-9 Search & Rescue Mysteries, Margaret Mizushima's Timber Creek novels, and C.J. Box.
What readers will find:
Under it: a truck nobody reported stolen, and a man nobody reported missing.
The mountains around Copper Falls take things. Once a decade or so, in the wet spring, they hand something back.
The slide comes down across the Coldwater Road switchbacks on the second Tuesday of April and takes out four hundred feet of hillside. It also takes out whatever the hillside had been sitting on for eleven years — a pickup, nose down, doors shut, and a driver still behind the wheel.
There is no missing-person report. There is no stolen-vehicle report. There is no name in this county that anyone has been waiting on.
The state calls it a recovery, not an investigation. A truck went off a road a long time ago; the road has been rebuilt twice since.
Riley Marsh disagrees.
Eighteen months back in Copper Falls, six cases behind her, engaged to nothing and settled anyway, Riley knows that a man who goes into a drainage and isn't missed was arranged not to be missed. Somebody made calls. Somebody explained an absence. In a town of 2,847, somebody is still explaining it.
And then Amos Teller — seventy-two, red suspenders, thirty years running this county's search unit, the man who taught Riley scent work when she was sixteen — stops answering his phone.
When he finally opens the door, he has something to tell her about October 2014.
She has wanted it for seven books. She is not ready for it.
THE GIVING GROUND is the seventh book in the Riley Marsh K-9 Search & Rescue Mysteries, a cozy-adjacent K-9 procedural set in the Montana high country. For fans of Sophie Lyon's K-9 Search & Rescue Mysteries, Margaret Mizushima's Timber Creek novels, and C.J. Box.
What readers will find:
- A complete standalone mystery and the hardest emotional turn in the series
Spring recovery work: unstable ground, eleven-year-old scent, and a dog certified for exactly this
A best friend who holds the line when everything else gives
A sheriff who is steady in the one week Riley cannot be
No graphic on-page violence — the crime is off-page; the aftermath is the story
The dog always comes home.
If you love a mystery that costs the sleuth something, one-click THE GIVING GROUND now and follow the dog.
Genre: Cozy Mystery