Sniffing Around Scent Work

My second review is really of a series, three fiction books, whose main character is a SAR handler and B&B owner. They are titled K9 Search: One Handler’s Journey, and K9 Search: Journey Through the Storm, and the last one is K9 Search: Navigating the journey by Sharolyn Sievert.

 The books open when the main character, Rebekkah (a SAR handler) is given an opportunity to open and run a B&B in a small mountain town, by a wealthy benefactor. She takes him up on his offer, and in addition to starting up a B&B business, also starts a local SAR team. The book follows her through SAR training, team politics, search adventures, and personal romance.

Rebekkah has two search dogs: Ariel, a German Shepherd “live find” dog, and Gus, a mixed breed cadaver dog. Sievert clearly knows her dogs, and there is lots of personality in these two. We hear about their search habits as well as the games they play with each other. We get treated to descriptions of training sessions with Ariel and Gus and other members of the newly formed SAR team, on water, and on the trail, and the ups and downs of certification trials.

Sievert also gives us lots of detail on deployments, and, since this is a fiction book, these searches probably end in more “finds” than her real-life searches do. We get to follow the team on successful search for a lost child, a woman with Alzheimers, and another for a hiker who never realized he was lost( which is apparently a fairly common phenomena among hikers who lose their way), though he had been missing for two days.

Even in this fictional world, there is competition and strife between different SAR teams. Rebekkah’s team gets accused of not having ‘properly trained dogs’ in an anonymous call to a Sheriff’s office, and they have to prove their worth to the local law enforcement groups. There are also financial woes, friendship stresses, all of life’s little problems, all of which get resolved tidily (I like resolution in my fiction…real life is hard enough).

Though these books are fictional, the author is a SAR handler who has clearly based her stories on real life events and real-life experience. The writing is clear and while the plot doesn’t move along at a fast pace, the characters are well drawn and  I enjoy reading about the day to day details of small town life. There is a decidedly Christian theme to these books, so if that bothers you, you should avoid them. (Also, in case you are sensitive to this type of thing: Rebekkah has to put down Gus at the end of the second book.) I have not yet read the third book in the series—it is on order—but I am hoping it arrives soon. These are perfect books to hunker down with during the dark cold weeks in December.  

There are a couple of books I have read recently that I cannot wholeheartedly recommend. I am mentioning them because, really, they are perfectly good books! I can be pretty picky about my reading material, but these are good stories and I did read through them to the end. So you might want to give them a try.

The first, called Go Find: My Journey to Find the Lost–And Myself (by Susan Purvis) was interesting, and well written, but…. well, a lot of the stories centered around her bumbling attempts to train her dog—when she decided to go into Search and Rescue she had no education of experience in dog training—and her decidedly macho missions to find lost people in the high mountains of Colorado. It is as much a biography as it is about SAR, and probably the main reason I didn’t like the book is that I probably wouldn’t like Purvis if I met her.

The second, Boogie on Down the Road: Training a Boykin Spaniel for Search and Rescue by Hilary Nickerson. This is the story of a woman training her Boykin to trail. The story itself is interesting, as it takes you through a lot of training steps of trailing, which you don’t often hear about, and the book ends with her dog getting certified, but I found the writing a bit amateurish and found my attention wandering as I read it. It might be worth a look, especially if you are a spaniel person.

That is it for my reviews for now. I hope y’all have a great holiday!

PS: In case you are wondering, I have NO CONNECTION to any of these books or authors. I came across these randomly and am just sharing cause, well, I am a librarian by training!