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Rating: 
Summary: good mystery, excellent search and rescue
Review: Alwyn's first novel draws upon her extensive experience with canine search and rescue. Brenna Scott, with her dog, leads a volunteer team, called upon to search for missing people. In Seattle at a conference, she and her private-detective boss respond when a 4-year-old girl goes missing in the middle of the night. Brenna, breaking a number of her own rules, is alone when she surprises the kidnapper and he tosses the victim into a raging creek. Brenna saves the girl but loses her dog.When another girl is kidnapped, a note is found addressed to Brenna, saying she has eight hours to find the child. But a tense, baffling, booby-trapped search ends in tragedy. The trickster killer, now fixated on Brenna, sends her coded, taunting email messages and stalks her, breaking into her house. Meanwhile the police, her boss and the FBI track down similar cases and hunt for a pattern. The climax, involving another kidnapped child and full-scale search, builds to a deadly struggle. The killer is cleverly creepy and the mystery complex and well-paced but the true stars here are the working dogs. Alwyn, whose writing can be a little awkward, shines when she gets into the search, bringing humans and dogs to life, their work fascinating and suspenseful.
Rating: 
Summary: Stuffy
Review: The book starts off with the heroine losing a search-and-rescue GSD. This dog is just wonderful, but dies senselessly during a mission. Well, if I lost one of my dogs, let alone one that I had worked with so closely for so long, I'd be a little more devastated than the few, not very moving lines of text mentioning the heroine's grief indicate. Okay, so she doesn't wallow. Well, she's kind of pompous and not very warm either. It's like the author tried to make her too perfect or something. Blech. I can read a book where the plot is unbelievable, silly, or otherwise not great, but the characters have GOT to be likeable. And this one absolutely is not. The only redeeming value is that you get some decent descriptions of the search-and-rescue operation, but I really do recommend a Virginia Lanier book not only for better technical info, but for the far more interesting characters and better plots (her heroine is more than a little fiesty, but much more exciting than Alwyn's). I also recommend Susan Conant's books for general dog information mixed in with great, enormously likeable characters and decent stories. Overall, this book is not awful, but it's not good either. It's unlikely that I'd read another book by this author.
Rating:
Summary: Good suspenseful mystery
Review: This is a good read for the dog & mystery enthusiast. It's about a vengeful father who's target is children of people who've betrayed him, and it's up to a search-and-rescue team leader and her dogs to find the missing children before they meet their demise; as well as their own in the end.
Well detailed and is filled with action from front to end cover.
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