What the Forest Knows

You've spent fourteen years being told the case is closed. Your gut has never once believed it.

K9 handler Wren Castillo has watched her search and rescue dog alert on the same stretch of forest for three straight seasons, and three straight seasons the department has told her the ground was already cleared years before she ever pinned on a badge. She is starting to understand that clear was never the truth. It was just the word this county uses to make people stop looking.

When a missing hiker finally forces Colville County to run a real search, Scout leads Wren straight back to the one place she has never been allowed to fully search: Cutter's Hollow, the exact ground her brother vanished from fourteen years ago. What the dog finds there does not close her brother's case. It reopens an investigation someone has spent fourteen years making absolutely sure no one could ever finish.

Inside What the Forest Knows, you will:

• follow a K9 handler who trusts her dog's nose over an entire department's paperwork
• watch three seasons of quiet suspicion finally break open into hard, undeniable evidence
• uncover a cover-up built one small, reasonable sounding lie at a time
• meet a state detective, skeptical of instinct, who becomes the one person willing to actually listen
• race toward a reveal that turns a search for a missing brother into a manhunt for the man who buried him
• come home to a small town where the one badge everyone trusts is the one thing nobody thought to question

This is the fifth and final book in the Claire Ashdown crime thriller series, and it stands completely on its own. If you have ever finished a Karin Slaughter, C.J. Box, or Lisa Gardner novel and immediately wanted another small town with something buried underneath it, you already know exactly what you are getting.

You know this feeling already. The ground says clear. Your gut says keep digging. Scroll up and grab your copy of What the Forest Knows, and find out exactly what the forest has been hiding.