What's the story behind the story? What inspired you to write this book?
Kate Soren was supposed to be a guest. She walked into Book 7 of my K-9 Search & Rescue Mysteries as a colleague of Gemma Hartley-Reyes, a former Innocence Project attorney who’d traded four years of wrongful-conviction work for a search dog and a training kennel in Colorado, and she was only meant to stay a few chapters. She wouldn’t leave. By the time that series was heading toward its finale, I knew Kate needed her own forest. The forest turned out to be the harder question, and the answer came from a technical problem. A search dog trained in dry mountain air reads scent the way you’d read a line on a map: it disperses, it thins, it points somewhere. Move that same dog into the Hoh Rain Forest, where humidity sits above ninety percent, and scent stops behaving. It doesn’t disperse. It pools. It soaks into moss and bark and the duff underfoot, and every person who walked that trail in the last two days is still there, at full volume, all at once. The trail isn’t a line anymore. It’s an archive. That seemed like exactly the right place to put a woman who was already certain she knew how to read evidence and a dog who was about to prove she read it better.
If you had to pick theme songs for the main characters of your book, what would they be?
Kate gets “Holocene” by Bon Iver, restrained, patient, a little haunted, the sound of somebody doing hard interior work very quietly. Scout gets “Run Boy Run” by Woodkid. All percussion and forward motion. No ambivalence anywhere in it. That’s the dog. Wren Bergstrom, my missing biologist, gets “Rivers and Roads” by The Head and the Heart, because it’s a song about distance and being found. And the Peninsula itself gets Fleet Foxes, anything off the first record. They’re a Seattle band, and they sound like weather coming in over water.
What's your favorite genre to read? Is it the same as your favorite genre to write?
Cozy mystery, and yes, I write the kind of book I want to curl up with. Clever puzzle, small town worth living in, an animal who’s smarter than at least two of the humans. But the reading that actually feeds the writing is natural history: field guides, forest ecology, working-dog nonfiction. I can’t write a search sequence until I understand what the dog is physically doing, and I can’t write the Olympic Peninsula until I understand why a nurse log is warm to the touch. The mystery is the shape of the book. The natural history is the reason it feels like somewhere real.
What books are on your TBR pile right now?
What the Dog Knows by Cat Warren, the best book I know of on how detection dogs actually work, and I keep going back to it. Finding the Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard, on the fungal networks connecting old-growth forests. Half of Book 1 grew out of thinking about what a forest floor remembers. And on the fiction side, I’m working through Margaret Mizushima’s Timber Creek K-9 books, which are exactly my lane and reliably better than I expect.
What scene in your book was your favorite to write?
The one where Kate gets it wrong. There’s a creek drainage deep in the Hoh where Scout alerts east, and everything in Kate’s training says the trail runs northwest. The terrain logic is clean. The reasoning is sound. She pulls the lead. Scout braces against it for two seconds and then turns because she’s a trained dog, and trained dogs follow their handlers. Then she checks over her shoulder. At fifty yards, she checks again. At a hundred yards, there’s one more look, the shortest one, and then her ears come forward and she lets it go. I rewrote those three glances more times than anything else in the book. They’re the whole series in miniature: the dog knew, the dog deferred, and the cost of that deference gets counted later in hours a real woman spent in a forest camp. Kate puts the error in her official report. That part mattered to me most of all.
Do you have any quirky writing habits? (lucky mugs, cats on laps, etc.)
I write search scenes standing up. Something about being on my feet keeps the pacing honest; if I’m bored on my feet, the reader is bored in the chair. Everything else gets written sitting down like a normal person. I also keep a running document of things the dog notices before the handler does. Most of them never make it into a book. It’s less a habit than a superstition at this point, but I don’t feel ready to start a manuscript without it.
Do you have a motto, quote or philosophy you live by?
“The dog often knows first.” It comes from Gemma Hartley-Reyes, who trained Kate, and it’s really about Gemma’s own late K-9, Kira. It runs underneath everything I write. It sounds like a handling maxim, and it is one, but it’s also a fairly demanding philosophy about the limits of your own reasoning. The thing standing right in front of you may already have the answer while you’re still assembling the argument.
If you could choose one thing for readers to remember after reading your book, what would it be?
Wren Bergstrom’s notebook. Wren is a wildlife biologist who goes missing in the upper Hoh, and while she’s being held, she does the only thing she knows how to do: she observes. She logs her captor’s schedule. She estimates her position from sun angle and tree species zonation. She sketches the elk. She caches food along an escape route over three nights. When Kate finally reaches her, Wren hands over a field notebook that is, functionally, a prosecution case file. I wanted a victim who was never a prop. Wren is frightened the entire time, and she documents the entire time, and both of those things are true at once. If a reader carries one thing out of this book, I’d like it to be a woman turning terror into data because data was what she had.
