An FBI K-9 Novel Book 2
Book Blurb:
As a serial killer plays games with the FBI, a special agent and her K-9 partner refuse to follow the rules in this Washington, D.C., thriller.
Somewhere in the Washington, D.C. area, a woman lies helpless in a box—barely breathing and buried alive. In Quantico, the FBI receives a coded message from the woman’s abductor. He wants to play a game: decipher the clues, save the girl. But when FBI cryptanalysts crack the code, Special Agent Meg Jennings and her K-9 partner, Hawk, are too late. An innocent life is lost…and the killer’s game is far from over.
With more coded messages, the deadly pattern is repeated—again and again. As the body count rises, Meg decides to break protocol and consult her brilliant sister, Cara, to decipher the kidnapper’s twisted clues. Putting her job on the line, Meg is determined not to let one more person die under her and Hawk’s watch. If the plan fails, it could bite them in the end. And if it leads to the killer, it could bury them forever . . .
My Review:
I can’t seem to resist getting back to a Sara Driscoll FBI K-9 novel, one of my favorite doggy series. This one, only the second in the series, but amazing with the amount of research into Civil War info and the little ditties at the beginning of each chapter. Designed to whet the interest and give a heads up to the next chapter, they are also a great learning tool of many little known military facts and those specifically gleaned from the Civil War experience.
Meg discovers she is the target of a perp who loves to play deadly games—his clues are usually left on the canine companion of an abducted woman. It’s up to the FBI cryptanalysts and then Special Agent Meg Jennings to decipher the code in time to find and save the woman. Eerily, the woman invariably looks much like Meg.
Meg’s dog is Hawk, a war canine she was able to obtain following the death of her then fiancé. A Belgian Malinois, he’s smart, alert, effective and trained extremely well. Meg is not without residual problems from her own military experience but she is smart and physical and can hold up with the best of them.
Her team includes an agent with another dog, but in this case, she quickly discovers she must carefully include two outside of the team for the help their intel can supply, one of whom is Clay McCord, a reporter who knows Civil War history. She does stretch credulity a bit this time with what a body (particularly a female body) is capable.
I appreciate the intelligence that Meg brings to the pages, but even more so the relationship she shares with Hawk and with the canine mystique in general. I always learn something new and discover it’s appalling I knew so little about my own beloved canine companions to whom we so often attributed anthropomorphic behaviors.
But as my buddy Michael Reisig says, “If you think it’s just a dog, then that’s all you’ll ever have.”
About this time last year, I read and reviewed Still Waters and love getting back to Meg, Hawk, and her amazing FBI page-turning thrillers and am always looking for another I might have missed or a new one coming out.
I received a copy of this book from my local well-stocked library that in no way influenced this review. These are my honest thoughts.
Rosepoint Rating: Four point Five Stars 
Book Details:
Genre: Animal Fiction, Dog Care, Kidnapping Thrillers
Publisher: Pinnacle Books
ASIN: B07HLYR1R4
Print Length: 309 pages
Publication Date: September 25, 2018
Source: Local Library
Title Link(s): Before It’s Too Late [Amazon]
The Authors: Sara Driscoll is the pen name of Jen J. Danna and Ann Vanderlaan,
authors of the Abbott and Lowell Forensic Mysteries. Jen is an infectious disease researcher at a cutting-edge Canadian university near Toronto, but loves to spend her free time writing the thrilling and mysterious. Ann lives in western North Carolina with five rescued pit bulls, including Kane, now a certified therapy dog. She also trains with Kane for competitive nose work. You can follow the latest news on the F.B.I. K-9 Mysteries at SaraDriscollAuthor.com.
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Rosepoint Publishing 