The Tracking Collar Trail

Ally Cagen finds what's hidden for a living. She never thought to track the lie in her own house.

Ally trains search-and-rescue dogs — the best handler in six counties, the woman they call when a child is missing on the mountain and every minute counts. She built her business and her forty acres from scrub and a shovel, one weekend at a time. The one thing she never learned to do was read a contract, so she handed all of that to the husband who was so good with it: Mark, charming Mark, who "handled the business side" and walked her dog every afternoon like the devoted man she thought she'd married.

Then a thunderstorm gets her dog loose, and Ally opens the GPS tracking collar to find him — and finds something else instead. The collar logs everywhere it goes. And every single weekday afternoon, the "dog walk" drove to the same address and parked for forty minutes. Not a park. Not a trail. A house she doesn't recognize.

It's Mark's brother's house. Alex — the careful one, the lawyer, the man who cried at her wedding and calls her sis.

There's no other woman. There's something worse: two brothers, meeting every afternoon to steal her life out from under her. The recert Ally signed before a four-day search was a clean decoy — the real document was a forged assignment, her signature faked onto a transfer of her land and her business into a company the brothers own, dated to a day she can prove she was two counties away pulling a lost hunter off a ridge. They've lined up a developer. They're weeks from bulldozing everything she built into cul-de-sacs. And they're so sure the dog trainer will never look up from the kennels that they hand her the microphone and the screen at their own celebration.

Big mistake. Ally proves where a man has been for a living.

She lets them throw their glittering open house. She runs the demo. And in front of the developer, the whole county, and a regional network nine hundred handlers strong, the feel-good slideshow cuts to a map: her dog's collar, driving to Alex's door every day for a month. Then the forged signature. Then the alibi that breaks it wide open.

Let the brothers keep each other. Ally kept the land, the dogs, the work, and the last word — and these days she's the one running the search.

Readers who love a cold, competent, clean-revenge heroine, a betrayal exposed in public, and a cheater (or two) who gets exactly what he earned will devour this one.