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The Unsent Letter
(2027)(The ninth book in the Riley Marsh K-9 Search & Rescue Mystery series)
A novel by Mara Perry
The case collapses on a technicality.
The witness dies before the deposition.
And then the letter arrives — twelve years late, in her brother's handwriting.
Riley Marsh has been right for eight books. In October, being right stops being enough.
The arrest that Copper Falls spent all summer arguing about comes apart in a pretrial hearing on a chain-of-custody question, in under forty minutes, in front of a courtroom that half emptied out relieved. The one witness who could have put it back together is found at home four days later, and the county calls it what it always calls it.
Nobody in the building thinks it was natural. Nobody in the building can prove it wasn't.
Riley Marsh disagrees — and this time she is nearly alone in it. The valley has divided. Half of Copper Falls thinks she cost the county a good man's reputation. The other half won't say what it thinks in public.
Two years back in Copper Falls, eight cases behind her, a ring on her finger and a dog going gray at the muzzle, Riley works a death nobody will call a death, with a sheriff taking professional damage for standing beside her and a rival volunteer torching his own standing to keep her in the field.
Then Dottie Pruett, forty-one years on the county radio, brings a shoebox to the barn.
And inside a box of papers from a house sale two counties north is an envelope. Addressed to Riley. Written five years ago. Never mailed.
He was alive. He was close. He was afraid to come home.
THE UNSENT LETTER is the ninth book in the Riley Marsh K-9 Search & Rescue Mysteries, a cozy-adjacent K-9 procedural set in the Montana high country. One book from the end. For fans of Sophie Lyon's K-9 Search & Rescue Mysteries, Margaret Mizushima's Timber Creek novels, and Nevada Barr.
What readers will find:
The witness dies before the deposition.
And then the letter arrives — twelve years late, in her brother's handwriting.
Riley Marsh has been right for eight books. In October, being right stops being enough.
The arrest that Copper Falls spent all summer arguing about comes apart in a pretrial hearing on a chain-of-custody question, in under forty minutes, in front of a courtroom that half emptied out relieved. The one witness who could have put it back together is found at home four days later, and the county calls it what it always calls it.
Nobody in the building thinks it was natural. Nobody in the building can prove it wasn't.
Riley Marsh disagrees — and this time she is nearly alone in it. The valley has divided. Half of Copper Falls thinks she cost the county a good man's reputation. The other half won't say what it thinks in public.
Two years back in Copper Falls, eight cases behind her, a ring on her finger and a dog going gray at the muzzle, Riley works a death nobody will call a death, with a sheriff taking professional damage for standing beside her and a rival volunteer torching his own standing to keep her in the field.
Then Dottie Pruett, forty-one years on the county radio, brings a shoebox to the barn.
And inside a box of papers from a house sale two counties north is an envelope. Addressed to Riley. Written five years ago. Never mailed.
He was alive. He was close. He was afraid to come home.
THE UNSENT LETTER is the ninth book in the Riley Marsh K-9 Search & Rescue Mysteries, a cozy-adjacent K-9 procedural set in the Montana high country. One book from the end. 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 case and the series' all-is-lost turn
Autumn court season in a town that has to keep working searches while it argues
The proposal, and the answer
An old dog stepping back and a young one stepping up
No graphic on-page violence — the crime is off-page; the aftermath is the story
The dog always comes home.
If you have followed Riley and Huck from the first larch season, one-click THE UNSENT LETTER now and follow the dog.
Genre: Mystery
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