Susannah Charleson

 
Susannah Charleson, the author of the national bestseller Scent of the Missing: Love and Partnership with a Search and Rescue Dog (Houghton Mifflin 2010), is a member of the nationally recognized MARK-9 Search and Rescue team in Dallas. The search dog she works with is a Golden Retriever named Puzzle. As a radio producer and media liaison for her unit, Charleson has written magazine and newsletter articles, multimedia productions, news stories, and features for commercial radio, radio theatre and parody, catalogue copy for a vintage jewelry store, and serial fiction on AOL. Her research interests include air-ground search procedure, the behavior of Alzheimers walkaways, and wildlife behavior in the presence of human distress and death. PRAISE FOR SCENT OF THE MISSING “A sparkling gem of a book.” —Las Vegas Review Journal “In this celebration of the human-animal bond, a fascinating woman has written eloquently about her fascinating colleague, a golden retriever named Puzzle, and the critically important search and rescue work they faced together. I LOVED this book.” —Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, author of The Hidden Life of Dogs “A riveting view of both the human animal bond and the training of search and rescue dogs.” —Temple Grandin, author of Animals in Translation “Heartwarming, heart-achingly poignant, and riveting from page one. Puzzle had me from her first joyous wroo!” —Hallie Ephron, author of Never Tell a Lie “The transformation of Puzzle the cuddly pup into Puzzle the professional search-and-rescue dog would be story enough, but Susannah Charleson gives us far more. With lean, lovely prose she takes us on a clear-eyed, compassionate journey into a mysterious world in which every story begins as a ghost story.  When Charleson turns the search inward, she does so deftly, never straying more than a leash-length from the heart and soul of this book: Puzzle, and the all-too-mortal ghosts she seeks.” —Michael Perry, author of Population: 485