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The Winter Guest
(2026)(The sixth book in the Riley Marsh K-9 Search & Rescue Mystery series)
A novel by Mara Perry
January in a town of 2,847.
One guest at the B&B.
He doesn't check out.
Nobody comes to Copper Falls in January. That's the whole point of January.
The Larkspur House has four rooms and, between the first week of the year and the thaw, usually zero guests. This year it has one: a quiet man in his fifties, paid in advance, no car, no explanation, who walks the same three miles of river road every morning and speaks to nobody but the owner's cat.
On the ninth morning he doesn't come down. Riley Marsh and her chocolate Lab, Huck, are called out four hours later for a man missing from a locked room in a town where you can see every road from the ridge.
The county calls it a wandering-off — an unwell stranger, deep cold, an unhappy but ordinary ending.
Riley Marsh disagrees.
Fourteen months back in Copper Falls, five cases behind her and a sheriff who has started saying stay like it's a complete sentence, Riley has learned that a person who arrives with no story is carrying one. This man came to Copper Falls on purpose. He walked the same road every day because he was waiting for something on it.
And in the inside pocket of a suitcase nobody claims is a photograph.
Riley's brother, older than she ever saw him. Standing in front of a building she doesn't recognize. Dated two years after the search for him was called off.
THE WINTER GUEST is the sixth 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 Sara Driscoll.
What readers will find:
One guest at the B&B.
He doesn't check out.
Nobody comes to Copper Falls in January. That's the whole point of January.
The Larkspur House has four rooms and, between the first week of the year and the thaw, usually zero guests. This year it has one: a quiet man in his fifties, paid in advance, no car, no explanation, who walks the same three miles of river road every morning and speaks to nobody but the owner's cat.
On the ninth morning he doesn't come down. Riley Marsh and her chocolate Lab, Huck, are called out four hours later for a man missing from a locked room in a town where you can see every road from the ridge.
The county calls it a wandering-off — an unwell stranger, deep cold, an unhappy but ordinary ending.
Riley Marsh disagrees.
Fourteen months back in Copper Falls, five cases behind her and a sheriff who has started saying stay like it's a complete sentence, Riley has learned that a person who arrives with no story is carrying one. This man came to Copper Falls on purpose. He walked the same road every day because he was waiting for something on it.
And in the inside pocket of a suitcase nobody claims is a photograph.
Riley's brother, older than she ever saw him. Standing in front of a building she doesn't recognize. Dated two years after the search for him was called off.
THE WINTER GUEST is the sixth 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 Sara Driscoll.
What readers will find:
- A complete standalone mystery with the tightest setting in the series
Deep-winter SAR: short light, long cold, and a dog working scent that the temperature keeps pinned to the ground
The slow burn stops being slow
A rival who quietly puts himself between Riley and the county
No graphic on-page violence — the crime is off-page; the aftermath is the story
The dog always comes home.
If you love a locked-town mystery, a hard winter, and a Lab who finds what the snow was supposed to keep, one-click THE WINTER GUEST now and follow the dog.
Genre: Cozy Mystery