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The Last Encore
(2026)(The fourth book in the Riley Marsh K-9 Search & Rescue Mystery series)
A novel by Mara Perry
Ninety-four degrees at the fairgrounds.
Four thousand people.
One man dead behind the stage, and a coroner blaming the sun.
Heatstroke doesn't wait until the encore.
The Grayling Roots Festival is the biggest weekend Copper Falls gets — three days of music at the old county fairgrounds, campers backed up two miles down the valley road, and a search-and-rescue unit that spends most of it doing what SAR actually does in July: finding lost kids, splinting ankles, and talking dehydrated tourists into shade.
Riley Marsh and her chocolate Lab, Huck, find the fourth act's frontman behind the stage trailer at 11:40 on Saturday night. It has been dark for two hours. It has been under eighty degrees for one.
The county calls it heat. The family accepts it. The festival runs Sunday as scheduled.
Riley Marsh disagrees.
Ten months back in Copper Falls, three cases behind her and a job she has stopped describing as temporary, Riley knows what heat does to a body because she spent twelve years as a paramedic watching it. This isn't that. This is something that looks like that — and somebody counted on a small county, a busy weekend, and a coroner with nine hundred other things to do.
Then Vance Kellerman, who has spent a year making sure everyone knows the unit should have been his, knocks on Riley's door and asks for her help.
And on the last hot afternoon of the summer, cleaning out the collapsed fort she and Danny built when she was eleven, Riley pries up a floorboard and finds a notebook in her brother's handwriting, in a code she has never seen, that he was still filling in the week he vanished.
THE LAST ENCORE is the fourth 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 Paula Munier.
What readers will find:
Four thousand people.
One man dead behind the stage, and a coroner blaming the sun.
Heatstroke doesn't wait until the encore.
The Grayling Roots Festival is the biggest weekend Copper Falls gets — three days of music at the old county fairgrounds, campers backed up two miles down the valley road, and a search-and-rescue unit that spends most of it doing what SAR actually does in July: finding lost kids, splinting ankles, and talking dehydrated tourists into shade.
Riley Marsh and her chocolate Lab, Huck, find the fourth act's frontman behind the stage trailer at 11:40 on Saturday night. It has been dark for two hours. It has been under eighty degrees for one.
The county calls it heat. The family accepts it. The festival runs Sunday as scheduled.
Riley Marsh disagrees.
Ten months back in Copper Falls, three cases behind her and a job she has stopped describing as temporary, Riley knows what heat does to a body because she spent twelve years as a paramedic watching it. This isn't that. This is something that looks like that — and somebody counted on a small county, a busy weekend, and a coroner with nine hundred other things to do.
Then Vance Kellerman, who has spent a year making sure everyone knows the unit should have been his, knocks on Riley's door and asks for her help.
And on the last hot afternoon of the summer, cleaning out the collapsed fort she and Danny built when she was eleven, Riley pries up a floorboard and finds a notebook in her brother's handwriting, in a code she has never seen, that he was still filling in the week he vanished.
THE LAST ENCORE is the fourth 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 Paula Munier.
What readers will find:
- A complete standalone mystery with a closed circle of suspects
Summer SAR: crowds, storms, heat, and a working dog in conditions nobody trains for
A rival crossing the line into ally, badly and on purpose
A meeting between the sheriff and Riley's mother that goes about as well as expected
No graphic on-page violence — the crime is off-page; the aftermath is the story
The dog always comes home.
If you love an amateur-sleuth mystery with real procedure under it and a Lab who works the crowd, one-click THE LAST ENCORE now and follow the dog.
Genre: Cozy Mystery