What's happened to the dead mother's newborn baby?

One traditional suggestion writers hear is, “Write what you know.” And that’s where Margaret Mizushima started.

She lives on a small ranch in Colorado, has been married to her veterinarian husband almost forty years. When she decided to write a series, which became the Timber Creek K-9 mysteries, “I knew that one of the characters needed to be a vet. In real life, however, vets may solve medical mysteries, but rarely (or perhaps I should say almost never) are they involved in murder mysteries.  I decided that a veterinarian and a K-9 handler could make an interesting crime fighting duo—trio if you count the dog, and dogs should always be counted.” 

Deputy Mattie Cobb, her German shepherd partner Robo, and veterinarian Cole Walker have now been involved in seven police procedurals in the Colorado high country, the latest being Striking Range.

It opens with two exciting chapters. Mattie and San Diego cold case detective Jim Hauck visit a Colorado prison to interview the man who tried to kill Mattie in an earlier book and who may have killed her father thirty years earlier. When Mattie and Jim Hauck reach the Colorado state prison where they will finally get to interview him, he’s found freshly dead in his cell. There’s one clue: a map leading to Timber Creek and rugged Redstone Ridge. Mattie and Hauck photograph the map with their cell phones.

(Quibbles: What kind of prison needs an interview room with an adjoining viewing room and recording equipment? Would staff be locked inside the room during a prison lockdown? From the outside, yes, with instructions to stay put; but locked inside, no. Finally, no one—not a CO, lawyer, detective, visitor—brings a cell phone into prison. But perhaps they do things differently in Colorado and these pettifogging notes do not diminish the book's enjoyment.)  

While Mattie is visiting prison, Cole is delivering a litter of pups Robo has just sired. The description of the canine c-section is as exciting as anything in the book. 

Left to explore the map’s clue without him, Mattie, Robo, Hauck, and a local rancher journey into the burned forest surrounding Redstone Ridge. But before they can finish their search, however, they’re called to help investigate the death of a young woman found in a campground filled with elk hunters. Identification of the deceased points to her having recently given birth, but the infant is nowhere to be found.

As a deadly storm descends upon the mountains, covering everything with a layer of ice and snow, Mattie and her team search for the missing newborn. The storm batters the area, taking its toll on the team and forcing the sheriff to call in reinforcements. When new evidence surfaces that this is not the only baby to vanish under suspicious circumstances, they decide that finding the woman’s killer will lead them to her baby, making them even more desperate to solve the case.

Then Cole goes missing, stranded alone in the high country with a person that Mattie now suspects is the mastermind behind several murders, including her father’s. She and Robo take to the trail to find Cole–but the killer has a cold-blooded plan that threatens them all.

Among the book’s many pleasures: 

—Robo. He’s a character. He may not be much of a conversationalist, but he communicates clearly.

—The landscape. Mizushima’s descriptions of the high country and small-town life make me want to go there.

—The dogs and their handlers. Robo eventually is not alone, but is joined by K-9 dogs trained to search for drugs, or cadavers, or explosives.

—The relationship between Mattie and Cole and the other characters. Mattie respects and is respected by her boss, the Sheriff, and she works well with a detective who, unlike Mattie, is not native to Timber Creek.

—Finally, Mizushima creatively avoids the cliché of the villain threatening to kill the female cop in the last few pages of the book. 

You do not have to have read the earlier Timber Creek K-9 mysteries to enjoy Striking Range, however it will improve your pleasure if you do read Burning Ridge first. (I reviewed it here.) In fact, the series is entertaining enough, you might start with Killing Trail to see how Mizushima has been able to build and sustain this world and the people in it. 

Meet Mattie Cobb, Timber Creek's K-9 cop

Killing Trail is Margaret Mizushima's first Timber Creek K-9 mystery. I wanted to read it because I enjoyed the fourth in the series, Burning Ridge. In Killing Trail we are introduced to Deputy Mattie Cobb who has just completed twelve weeks of training with Robo, the county's new police service dog. We meet Cole Walker, Timber Creek's only veterinarian, whose wife has left him and their two daughters. We meet the town's sheriff, Abraham McCoy, and another deputy, Brody, who resents Mattie because she beat him in the competition to become the town's K-9 officer. We also meet Detective Stella LoSasso who is called in from the county seat to take charge of the investigation of the crime and who, by book four, is living in Timber Creek.

Asked about her writing, Mizushima said in an interview, "Initially, I wrote mainstream, and then historical romance. I placed in a few contests but didn't get published. Switching to mystery came from my love of crime documentaries and crime fiction, as well as a little push from a friend."

In the same interview, she advises aspiring or beginning writers "to attend writing conferences where you will learn about writing craft and the publishing business. I met both my agent and editor at writing conferences; that personal introduction will get you much further than a query letter or a slush pile submission."

I suspect she also learned that a mystery series is more likely to be published than a single book, that it is best to have a spunky detective with an original or unusual partner, that a mystery needs complexity but not too much, and that it doesn't hurt to have the heroine rush into danger in the last fifth of the book.

Killing Trail begins when a forest ranger finds fresh blood on the porch of an empty cabin in the national forest outside of town . . . and Robo sniffs out the body the blood came from buried in the wilderness.

Although Mizushima is writing from the inside—she grew up on a cattle ranch in the Colorado high country and Timber Creek is a composite of several small Colorado towns—and although it took her three years to write Killing Trail, she was still finding her way in this book. The mystery is not very mysterious (experienced readers will have identified the villain by the middle) and Robo has more personality than Mattie.

Mizushima has given Mattie troubled childhood: an abused mother who disappeared when Mattie and her (now estranged) brother were small, an imprisoned father who was killed in prison, a foster home with a loving, if overworked, Hispanic woman. Mattie's been a deputy for seven years (she seems to be about thirty years old), but she seems to have no life beyond police work. Cole Walker is a potential love interest, one that is still developing by book four.

Nevertheless, Killing Trail is a creditable first effort. Robo is not a prop but an active and important character in the book. Cole's veterinary skill has consequences. And the book is good enough to justify three more installments.

Who all is buried high on Redstone Ridge?

Burning Ridge is Margaret Mizushima's fourth Timber Creek K-9 mystery and the first I've read. It's a police procedural with an interesting cop—Sheriff's Deputy Mattie Cobb and her German shepherd K-9 partner Robo who work out of small Colorado town. Mattie is romantically involved with the widowed local veterinarian Cole Walker, and the narrative shifts from Mattie to Cole and back, sometimes in the same chapter.

The action commences when Cole takes his two daughters riding into the mountains to show them some bighorn mountain sheep before he and a crew from Colorado Parks and Wildlife relocate them to another area. Redstone Ridge is high enough and remote enough it can be reached only on horseback. The outing turns grim when the family's Doberman pinscher who has been ranging off the trail returns with a charred boot that contains a foot and leg bone.

When Mattie and Robo, Cole, and Sheriff McCoy and his team return to the area, Robo sniffs out a shallow grave in which a body has been partially cremated. We learn almost immediately that Mattie has a close personal connection to the dead man. The legal team also discovers three similar graves, two adults and a child—but these are thirty years old. What's the connection? Is there a connection?

According to the book's publicist, "Mizushima lives in Colorado where she assists her husband with their veterinary practice and Angus cattle herd." In other words, she's writing from the inside. She knows the landscape, she knows how to treat of animals, and has picked up enough about police dog handling to write convincingly about it. For example:

      Mattie opened her pack, removed Robo's collapsible bowl, and filled it with water from her own drinking supply. He'd drunk freely from streams on the way up, but she wanted him to moisten his mucus membranes now to enhance his scenting ability, Besides, it was a valuable part of their routine.
     After he lapped at the liquid, she took off his collar and put on his tracking harness, his signal that it was time to search. Robo assumed his all-business face, adopting a serious attitude for the first time on this outing instead of acting like he was along for a picnic.
     "Robo, heel." Taking the ice chest [containing the charred boot and leg] with her, she led him a short distance from the rest of the group and began to tousle his fir and pat his sides. She used the high-pitched chatter meant to rev up his prey drive. "Robo, are you ready to work? Are you? Let's find something . . . ."

Timber Creek, Colorado, is a small town. Mattie has lived there all her life. Everyone knows everyone not by six degrees of separation but by two. How much mystery can there be?

Burning Ridge plausibly implies there's a lot. Rough men pass through town on their way elsewhere. Strangers move into town to make a new start. Men abuse women. Parents mistreat children. There's enough work to occupy the Sheriff, his deputies, the detective (and Mattie's friend) Stella LoSasso, the Parks and Wildlife manager, and state resources in Denver.

All of which is to say that Burning Ridge is engaging (and rewarding) because Mattie and Cole are not isolates; they are embedded in a recognizable social fabric and what they do—or don't do—seems reasonable based on who they are and where they are. Burning Ridge is interesting enough that I'm going to look up Mizushima's first in the series, Killing Trail, and will report back. Stay tuned.