False Trail (Black Pine K-9 Mysteries Book 1)

Nine days into her new life in Black Pine, Wren Hale finally has a job for her dog. Then a five-year-old girl walks into the woods behind her own house and doesn’t come out. Rook finds a trail fast. But every new piece of evidence seems to point somewhere different: an abandoned silver mine, a footprint that doesn’t fit, a suspicious van, and a neighbor lying about where he was that morning. The county sheriff doesn’t want a volunteer and a dog running his investigation. He also can’t explain why he’s more afraid of that mountain than anyone searching it, or why he keeps turning up exactly where he shouldn’t. Wren has her own reasons to keep her head down. Two weeks before she came to Black Pine, she did something she’s certain would end her life as she knows it if anyone ever found out. She hasn’t told a soul. She may not get the choice much longer. As the search stretches into its sixth day, the case forces Wren toward the one kind of place she swore she’d never go near again. Rook keeps finding something real. The danger is what everyone else believes it means. False Trail is Book One of the Black Pine K-9 Mysteries, featuring K-9 search and rescue, small-town secrets, wilderness suspense, and a heroine who finds everyone else’s missing people while running from her own past. For readers who love working-dog mysteries, atmospheric mountain settings, capable female protagonists, and investigations where the evidence is never quite what it first appears to be.