The Salt Line

Pacific Northwest K-9 Mysteries, Book 2

By: Sophie Lyon

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

The tide moves the boundary twice a day. The killer was counting on it.

A body washed up on a beach the locals call the Salt Line.

The dead woman is Hazel Strand, fifty-eight, a Maritime Heritage Surveyor whose seven-month documentation of a contested tidal zone could permanently block a coastal development worth tens of millions. The county is calling it accidental drowning. The tide cycle is set to scrub the cliff above her in six hours.

Kate Soren disagrees.

Five months on the Olympic Peninsula and one Hoh Rain Forest case behind her, Kate is still learning the coast, a different scent environment, a different jurisdictional tangle, a different kind of erasure. Salt corrupts what the rain forest preserves. The strait is federal water below the tide line, state above it, and tribal where treaty lines run. A body placed at the salt line is a body placed inside a jurisdictional ambiguity, and a tide clock.

But Scout finds a second scent on the clifftop above where Hazel fell.

Someone walked her up there. Someone left a different chemical signature than the one staged at the bottom. And somewhere on this contested coast, a developer named Torgeir Strandli is filing permits issued through a county office Kate has never heard of, signed by a name she’s about to start writing in her field log.

The case is six hours from going underwater.

THE SALT LINE is the second book in Sophie Lyon’s Pacific Northwest K-9 Mysteries, a cozy-adjacent series following former lawyer Kate Soren and her German Shepherd Scout across eight Olympic Peninsula environments. For fans of Margaret Mizushima, Paula Munier, and Sara Driscoll.

What readers will find:

• A standalone coastal mystery in a 24-book Pacific Northwest series
• Real tidal-zone scent work and dual-jurisdiction investigation
• A protagonist who reads the coast the way she once read a courtroom
• The Olympic Peninsula’s storm coast as a character on every page
• No graphic violence. The dog always comes home.
• Series antagonist arc deepens, the name in Kate’s field log gets longer

One-click THE SALT LINE now and walk the tide line before the next cycle takes the evidence.