I bought Stalking Ground as a comfort read after having enjoyed Killing Trail, the first book in the series.

While Stalking Ground lived up to Margret Mizushima’s description of the Timber Creek K-9 series as “...police procedurals with heart. Each adventure contains a combination of K-9 cop action, veterinary work, and family relationships as well as a murder case to investigate and solve. I also strive to provide an element of suspense within the structure of a traditional mystery.“, it turned out to be a little too cosy fully to hold my attention.

For the first eighty per cent of the book, Stalking Ground was a pleasant read but not the book to reach for if you’re looking for a tense thriller or a knotty mystery. It felt like a ride-along with likeable people following procedure to find the bad guy and dealing with their personal stuff on the side.

Apart from a tense opening scene of the book, where Mattie and her dog Robo were chasing armed men, most of the action happened in the last 20 per cent of the book. The tension ratcheted up. The different storylines converged, lives were at risk and Robo and Mattie had to work together to save the day.

The mystery was straightforward but good enough to keep me reading. It felt like one of those TV shows where I don’t feel you have to press pause if I get up to make a pot of tea.

The scenes where Robo was working and the veterinary scenes both felt authentic and held my interest.

The main focus was on the relationships between the members of the ensemble cast of characters. These scenes worked well enough but I felt that Margaret Mizushima was holding back a little on the emotional content. She addressed the romantic side of things in a conventional if slightly coy way but I felt she was stepping around the darker aspects of the story. Mattie is struggling with half-remembered trauma from her childhood which is being pulled to the surface by her communication with her estranged brother. The vet’s eldest daughter is showing signs of stress. She has been abandoned by her mother and is recovering from the violent death of a close friend. These things felt real but they were handled with so much tact and discretion that I felt the emotional impact was muted.

I’m wondering if this series is going to be too cosy for me. What it does it does well but I may not be its target audience. I’ll try one more book some time next year and then see how things go.