LONE WOLF is out!

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LONE WOLF releases today! *throws confetti* It feels like it’s been a long time coming, but it’s finally here: book 1 in the FBI K-9s series is out!

So what is LONE WOLF all about?

In the first book in a thrilling new series, FBI Special Agent Meg Jennings and Hawk, her loyal search-and-rescue Labrador, must race against time as they zero in on one of the deadliest killers in the country . . . 

Meg and Hawk are part of the FBI’s elite K-9 unit. Hawk can sniff out bodies anywhere—living or dead—whether it’s tracking a criminal or finding a missing person. When a bomb rips apart a government building on the National Mall in Washington D.C., it takes all of the team’s extensive search-and-rescue training to locate and save the workers and visitors buried beneath the rubble. 

But even as the duo are hailed as heroes, a mad bomber remains at large, striking terror across the Eastern seaboard in a ruthless pursuit of retribution. As more bombs are detonated and the body count escalates, Meg and Hawk are brought in to a task force dedicated to stopping the unseen killer. But when the attacks spiral wide and any number of locations could be the next target, it will come down to a battle of wits and survival skills between Meg, Hawk, and the bomber they’re tracking to rescue a nation from the brink of chaos.

 

You can find LONE WOLF at the following fine retailers in hardcover, ebook and audiobook formats: Amazon.com, Amazon.ca, Amazon.co.uk, Chapters/Indigo, B&N, BAM, IndieBound, Target, Walmart, Hudson Booksellers

 

What are people saying about LONE WOLF? Here is just a taste of some of the reviews out there:

RT Book Reviews: "An exciting angle for genre fans." 4 stars - Book Review: LONE WOLF

Publishers Weekly: "wonderfully readable series launch" - Fiction Book Review: LONE WOLF

Steph's Book Blog: "a fantastic new series". Book Review: LONE WOLF

CrimeBookJunkie: "This book was highly emotive, gripping, intense and full of suspense from the beginning straight on through to the end!  Would I recommend it?  OMFG that is a no brainer!  Hell yeah, I would!! I loved it so much, it is my current #BookOfTheMonth!" 5 stars

Not a Book Snob: "I  enjoyed Lone Wolf tremendously, so much in fact that I was up way past my bedtime reading." - Book Review: LONE WOLF

The Reading Room: "The characters are fresh and interesting including the canine ones, the plot is all too plausible in our world today, and the story unfolds in a chilling atmosphere of well-measured suspense." Book Review: LONE WOLF

Bibliophile Book Club: "Pretty much full of action from the outset, I found myself having trouble putting it down. I didn’t want to stop reading it once I started, which is always a good thing." Book Review: LONE WOLF

 

To celebrate LONE WOLF’s release, I held a launch event on the weekend at our incredible local bookstore, A Different Drummer. Here are a few pictures from the event.

Many thanks to the wonderful team at Kensington including Esi Sogah, our new editor, Morgan Elwell, our publicist, Kimberly Richardson, digital sales, Lauren Jernigan, social media specialist, Robin Cook, our production editor, and the rest of the Kensington team, from the art department all the way up to president Steven Zacharius. We've felt incredibly supported and the team has bent over backward at every step. Also, big thanks to Peter Senftleben, our original editor who bought the series as a three-book deal. He was a major force behind LONE WOLF, and the book wouldn't have been the same without him. He's recently moved on to a new publishing house, but has left us in Esi's excellent hands and we hope to continue to do him proud as we move forward in the series.

So, please join Ann and I in celebrating the birth of a new book and new series, and in welcoming Meg Jennings and Hawk. The fun is only just beginning!

A LONE WOLF Preview

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We’re only a week out from the official release of LONE WOLF, so Ann and I wanted to release a #TuesdayTeaser of the first three chapters of the novel. Like what you read and want to have the entire book ready for instant gratification on release day? You can place your order at any of these fine retailers: Amazon.com, Amazon.ca, Amazon.co.uk, Chapters/Indigo, B&N, BAM, IndieBound, Target, Walmart, Hudson Booksellers.

You can find the first three chapters below. Happy reading!

I’m happy to celebrate the official launch of LONE WOLF this coming Saturday, November 26th at A Different Drummer Books in Burlington, Ontario at 4pm. In the area and want to get a copy of the book days before it’s officially available at any other retailer? Then come on out! I’d be thrilled to see you!

Canine Highlight – 9/11’s Bretagne

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On September 11, 2001, Bretagne—pronounced by her handler Denise Corliss as ‘Brittany’—and her handler were one of 300 search-and-rescue teams that arrived immediately following the disaster. After Corliss rescued the golden retriever, she and Bretange trained twenty to thirty hours a week to become members of Texas Task Force One (TF-1), one of twenty-eight federal teams that work under FEMA’s Urban Search-and-Rescue System. Even though they had been members of TF-1 for a year by that point, in an amazing trial by fire, 9/11 was Bretagne’s first outing as a search-and-rescue dog. She and Corliss were on-site for nearly two weeks as the operation began as a rescue, and then inevitably morphed into a recovery. Completing gruelling twelve-hour shifts every day, the dogs often worked to exhaustion, many of them requiring IV fluids because of the conditions and effort required. Depression caused by the lack of live survivors is a common problem for search-and-rescue dogs, and was a significant problem during 9/11 since the last survivor was pulled from the rubble just twenty-seven hours after the attack. During the days and weeks that followed, only the dead were found. In an effort to keep the spirits of the dogs up, emergency workers hid in the rubble for the dogs to ‘find’.

Bretagne was not only a search-and-rescue dog during the 9/11 operations, she also worked as an impromptu therapy dog. One day, during their shift, Bretagne noticed a devastated fireman slumped on the ground. Ignoring Corliss’s commands to return, Bretagne went to the man, lay down beside him and put her head in his lap. Years later, Bretagne and the same fireman were reunited at a remembrance service and he remembered her and how crucial her act of comfort had been that day.

Bretagne worked for another seven years with Corliss as part of TF-1 and was involved in searches that followed Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005. Even after she retired from search-and-rescue at ten years of age, she continued her work as a therapy dog, working with learning disabled children at a local elementary school as a reading buddy.

At the time of her death from kidney failure on June 6, 2016, Bretagne was the last known surviving search-and-rescue dog from Ground Zero. Active right up to her final days, Bretange was just two months shy of her seventeenth birthday, an incredible age for a dog who’d worked in disaster sites known for their toxicity. Studied for her entire life for the impact of 9/11 pollutants, Bretagne’s last gift was a medical screening and necropsy at Texas A&M Veterinary School. Months before, as a sign of appreciation and to celebrate her sixteenth birthday, BarkPost.com hosted Corliss and Bretagne in New York City, putting them up at a luxury hotel, showering the dog with toys and cake, and even presenting her with the canine equivalent of the key to the city, the Bone of the Dog Park to Hudson River Park.

Photo credit: Denise Corliss and Andrea Booher/FEMA

The Brains Behind the Dog

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In the past few weeks, we’ve talked about working dogs—the roles of dogs, both historical and modern, search-and-rescue dogs and the kind of searches they perform, the role of the canine nose, and search patterns. But while we’ve been very focused on the dogs, we’ve omitted any discussion of a crucial partner in these tasks: the handler.

The handler and dog make up a bonded team. The dog is the nose, but the handler is the brains of the operation. Remember last week when we talked about the challenges of searches due to terrain, or heating and cooling cycles? It’s the handler who acts as the strategist, figuring out how to stack the deck in the dog’s favour to improve the odds that the dog is successful. No matter how good the dog is, if the handler starts him in the wrong location, he’ll never catch the first trace of scent and will never find the person or object he’s searching for. It’s up to the handler to take all the conditions and the location into account, and then let the dog run the search with minimal interference. In the event that the search is not successful, it is up to the handler to somehow reward the dog so that no search day ends in failure.

But we’re not just talking about search-and-rescue handlers. We’re also talking about handlers of police, therapy, and military dogs. It takes a special kind of person to be a successful handler. Most of these men and women live with their dog 24/7, many of them in multi-dog homes. They don’t kennel the dog at the end of a police shift; the dog comes home with them and lives with their family. This kind of constant presence helps establish an initial bond, and then keeps it vital throughout the whole partnership. To reinforce this bond, many K-9s are only fed by their handlers. Food is used to reinforce successful training and proper behavior, and can be the dog’s entire source of nutrition. This also means that training doesn’t only happen at the beginning of the dog’s working life; it continues every day, throughout the day, for their entire working career. Many police and military handlers permanently adopt their K-9 once the dog retires into civilian life. A new working K-9 may then come into the mix, but the first partner is rarely discarded. The bond is that strong. In our upcoming release, LONE WOLF, the relationship between FBI handler Meg Jennings, and her black Lab, Hawk, is the centerpiece of the story. If woman and dog are not in perfect harmony, the killer in the story can’t be caught.

My writing partner Ann is a handler herself. Pictured above with her pit bull, Kane, they are a therapy team, making regular visits to  domestic violence shelters and adult day care facilities. In addition, they are training right now in competitive nosework and have already passed odor recognition tests.

So, the next time you see a working dog, remember the man or woman standing at the other end of that leash. It’s their dedication and bond with the dog that ultimately allows that team to be successful.

Photo credit: Ann Vanderlaan

Following The Scent Trail

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Last week we talked about the canine nose and how both its architecture and receptors make it the perfect search tool. Today we’re going to talk about some of the difficulties dogs and their handlers have to overcome while they are working.

Scent: Scent particles emanate from everything—people, animals, and objects. In still air and away from walls and upright surfaces, scent radiates evenly from the source, the scent particles being more concentrated near the person or item and then diffusing outward, the concentration slowly falling as the scent moves outward. But unless the dog is searching in an area with minimal air currents and no heating, this kind of even diffusion is rare. Both indoors and outdoors, air is always moving and this greatly affects the dispersal of scent.

Scent Cones: In the presence of air movement, scent moves along the direction of the current, diffusing outward as it progresses until it encounters an upright surface. As a result, an ever-widening cone of scent is blown away from the origin point. Search-and-rescue dogs use this scent cone to zero in on what they are searching for.

Basic search patterns: Consider the scenario of a search-and-rescue air scenting dog who is searching for a lost child. If lucky, the parents of the child will be able to provide a piece of clothing that the dog can use to identify the child. The dog will do a heads-up search of the area, looking for any trace of that particular odor. When the dog finds the scent, he will start a pattern of trying to narrow down the scent cone, working across the wide end of the cone until he runs out of scent. Then he will turn around and run back through the cone until he runs out the other side. He will then move upwind and repeat the process. With each progressive pass through the cone, the dog will move in the direction of the stronger scent, narrowing the search cone. In the end, the dog will work its way to the lost child, the origin of the scent.

Sounds straight forward, doesn’t it? Unfortunately, in the real world, it’s rarely that easy for a number of reasons:

Air currents: Air currents blow scent mainly in one direction. This can be an advantage as the current can spread the scent a long way in the direction of the prevailing wind. Unfortunately, if dogs are coming into the search area from upwind, they are essentially nose blind until they are practically on top of the subject.

Obstacles: Obstacles can play havoc with air currents, causing a nearly straight stream of scent to pool into the dead space behind or in front of the obstacle and create a turbulent cycle. Air then coming out of that cycle could be moving in any direction, taking the scent trail with it. This makes it hard for the dog to correctly identify where the scent is coming from since he may catch the edge of an eddy, try to find the scent cone, but then lose the scent entirely as it eddies away from him.

Obstacles can also cause a chimney effect, pushing the air current high over a building or forest line so the scent finally falls to the dog’s level hundreds of feet from the source and is nearly impossible to track.

Heating and cooling: Hot air rises and cool air falls. As a result, typical daytime heating causes air currents to rise, while nighttime cooling causes them to fall. If a dog is searching a valley for a victim, the handler has to be aware of the heating and cooling patterns, initiating a late afternoon search on the hilltop above the valley. During the cooler early morning, the handler would start the search at the bottom of the valley to maximize the dog’s chance of finding the edge of the scent cone.

Terrain: In a perfect world, a search would take place in a flat field with no boulders or trees to disrupt the scent cone. But that’s not how the real world works. There are multilevel hills and valleys, rocks and trees, buildings, roads and bridges. And all of those can disrupt the scent cone making what might have been a straightforward search into a significant challenge.

Search-and-rescue dogs often make these searches look easy, but it’s intuitive strategizing by the handler and hours and hours of training by the dogs that let these teams carry off their job so smoothly. We’ve talked a lot about the dog half of a search-and-rescue team, but what about the handlers? We’ll be back next week so look at the special kind of people who make up the human side of these amazing teams.

Photo credit: Ramón Peco, Daryl James, Kristina D.C. Hoeppner, Michael Lehenbauer, and Steve.