Hunting Hour: A Timber Creek K-9 Mystery
Mystery/Police Procedurals/Woman Sleuths
3rd in Series
Crooked Lane Books (August 8, 2017)
Hardcover: 320 pages

Synopsis

Deputy Mattie Cobb is in a dark place and has withdrawn from Cole Walker and his family to work on issues from her past. When she and her K-9 partner Robo get called to track a missing junior high student, they find the girl dead on Smoker’s Hill behind the high school, and Mattie must head to the Walker home to break the bad news. But that’s only the start of trouble in Timber Creek, because soon another girl goes missing—and this time it’s one of Cole’s daughters.

Knowing that each hour a child remains missing lessens the probability of finding her alive, Mattie and Robo lead the hunt while Cole and community volunteers join in to search everywhere. To no avail. It seems that someone has snatched all trace of the Walker girl from their midst, including her scent. Grasping at straws, Mattie and Robo follow a phoned-in tip into the dense forest, where they hope to find a trace of the girl’s scent and to rescue her alive. But when Robo does catch her scent, it leads them to information that challenges everything they thought they knew about the case.

Mattie and Robo must rush to hunt down the kidnapper before they’re too late in Hunting Hour, the third installment in critically acclaimed author Margaret Mizushima’s exhilarating mystery series.

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Guest Post

THE VALUE OF SEARCH AND RESCUE DOGS

By Margaret Mizushima

Throughout the past thirty-five years, my veterinarian husband and I have shared our lives with a pack of dogs. When our children were young, we decided to train two of our dogs in search and rescue. A tragic event in our community precipitated this decision.

We live in an agricultural area nestled against the foothills of the rugged Rocky Mountains in northern Colorado. The mountains to the west offer scenic pleasure in the form of river rafting, fishing, hiking, and picnicking for locals as well as tourists from all over the country. Countless families spend weekends and vacations on the river or hiking in the forests without incident, but family fun can turn deadly when a loved one, and especially a child, strays from the group and becomes lost.

In 1978, soon after our older daughter was born, a ten-year-old boy disappeared while hiking with his parent on the Gray Rock Trail in the Cache la Poudre Canyon north of Fort Collins. The media reported that this child and the adults he was hiking with made it to the top of the trail and had turned around to head back downhill. The boy asked if he could go ahead and meet them below. After gaining permission, he hurried ahead on his own. When the rest of his party arrived at the trailhead, he wasn’t there. Trace of him has never been found, and he remains missing to this day.

People speculate that this child misread the twists and turns of the trail, became lost in the wilderness, and subsequently perished. Others believe that he was kidnapped and taken far from his family and our community. His family erected a memorial for him at the Gray Rock trailhead, and I stop each time before hiking there to say a prayer for him and his family.

Sometime after our second daughter was born, we decided to head for the mountains to camp on summer weekends when we could take time away from the vet clinic. Memories of this devastating event motivated us to train at least one of our dogs in search and rescue, primarily so that we would have the option of our own dog tracking our child immediately if necessary. We joined a search and rescue training group, taking our Rottweiler, Ilsa, and our Austrailian shepherd, Jessie.

Wow, the things we learned! This is where I learned the value of using water to moisten mucous membranes to enhance scenting ability as well as how to combine the search and rescue equipment with the activity involved. At first, the dogs were allowed to play and socialize, but as soon as search harnesses came out, the tone became serious. You could observe which dogs caught onto this over time and which ones struggled to switch off the urge to tussle with the other dogs.

Dog owners themselves laid down the scent trail, keeping it very short in the beginning and then following a training protocol to increase the difficulty in incremental steps as the dog advanced through the stages. Once the scent trail was set, the dog owner would hide, and the group leader would set the dog onto the track. The best reward in the world is finding someone you love at the end of the track, and dogs did a happy dance as they joyously reconnected with their “lost” owners. Gradually, strangers were substituted for owners, and that joyful response still carried over at the end of each search.

Thankfully, we never needed to use our dogs to search for lost children, but our entire family, kids included, enjoyed those months of training and reinforcement of search skills. Due to job commitments and time constraints, neither my husband nor I were able to join the county search and rescue team ourselves, but we gained a new respect for the level of dedication and fitness required of these volunteers.

In those days, I had no idea that someday I would write a mystery series that featured a German shepherd K-9 with search and rescue skills. It’s safe to say that this experience helped set the stage for the creation of K-9 Robo and his handler Deputy Mattie Cobb, and I invite you to join me in their adventures.

About the Author

Margaret Mizushima is the author of the Timber Creek K-9 mysteries, which includes Killing Trail (Crooked Lane Books, 2015) nominated for an RT Reviewer’s Choice award for best first mystery, Stalking Ground (Crooked Lane Books, 2016) a finalist in the Colorado Book Awards mystery category, and Hunting Hour (Crooked Lane Books, 2017). She has a background in speech pathology and practiced in an acute care hospital before establishing her own rehabilitation agency. Currently, she balances writing with assisting her husband with their veterinary clinic and Angus cattle herd. She enjoys reading and hiking, and she lives on a small ranch in Colorado where she and her husband raised two daughters and a multitude of animals.

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