When I started writing the first book in my K-9 Alaska series, K-9 DEFENSE, I didn’t know it was going to be part of a series. I had a vision of a wounded ex-Marine and his faithful companion, the Combat Tracker dog who’d been to war with him, but now had to help him adjust to civilian life. I knew Colter Hayes was hiding out in a remote town in Alaska, avoiding moving on with his life after the loss of the rest of his team. When Kensie Morgan shows up, searching for the sister who disappeared when she was just a child, and asks for his help, it gives Colter a mission he never wanted – and forces him to re-emerge from his self-inflicted isolation.
As I headed into the second half of that story, and we learned more about Alanna Morgan, Kensie’s long-lost sister, I realized I really wanted to tell her story. So, I pitched three more books to follow K-9 DEFENSE and happily, my publisher was on board. Now, it’s five years later and Alanna Morgan is back in a city she hasn’t lived in since she was five years old. Her sister and brother-in-law saw how she connected with Colter’s Combat Tracker dog, so they got her a St. Bernard therapy dog to help with her anxiety. Alanna is trying desperately to find a way to fit back into a life she barely remembers, to navigate the reporters who still haven’t lost interest in telling her story, when the woman who kidnapped her – the woman who raised her for most of her life – escapes from jail and kidnaps another child.
Leaving Chicago, leaving the family she’s finally started to re-connect with after so many lost years, isn’t easy. But the guilt of having stayed silent through her childhood – no matter the reason – has haunted her. For years, the woman who kidnapped her, Darcy Altier raised Alanna like her own daughter, loved her like her own daughter. Over time, Alanna came to love her, too. But she made the tough decision to turn her in back then and she knows she can help again now, and prevent another child from growing up away from the family they were meant to be with. So, along with her therapy dog Chance, she flies back to the remote town in Alaska where she was hidden away for years.
She expects police to want her help, but they don’t trust her. They know how conflicted she is. The Altiers may have kidnapped her, but they also raised her with love. She may have turned them in, but that doesn’t mean she’s stopped loving them back.
No one is more suspicious of her motives than rookie police officer Peter Robak. Being a police officer is a new career for him, after he found he couldn’t bear to continue being a war reporter. In his final job covering a hostage exchange, the hostage’s actions resulted in the loss of most of the hearing in one of his ears and the end of his career. He knows better than anyone what years of dependence and fear can do to a person, how it can muddle their loyalty. And how their actions can destroy the lives of the people around them.
But as the search expands and it becomes clear Alanna is right that Darcy is coming back to Alaska, Peter and Alanna reluctantly have to work together. And soon Alanna discovers that Peter is right, too: if they want to save the child, she may have to sacrifice someone she loves.
Creating Alanna Morgan was a challenge I loved. She fascinated me from the moment she appeared on the page in K-9 DEFENSE. She’d been stolen from her family at five years old, so she still remembered them, but as time went by, those memories had become fuzzy. She’d been afraid initially, but the people who kidnapped her were looking for a child of their own and raised her as if she was theirs. She hadn’t wanted to love them, but over the course of fourteen years, she had. And that relationship was complicated even more by the “siblings” she also loved. Turning in the people she’d called “Mom” and “Dad” for so long wasn’t easy for her, but she’d made the choice to return to a family she barely remembered because ultimately, she knew what the Altiers had done was wrong.
I knew Alanna was a strong, moral person. But I also knew the conflict she felt in K-9 DEFENSE for breaking up a “family” who loved her and loved each other wouldn’t just disappear. And the challenges of returning to a family she hadn’t known since she was very young wouldn’t be simple. Nor would opening herself up to meeting new people when she’d been mostly isolated from the ages of five to nineteen. To me, the core of who Alanna is comes from her ability to love and her strength to do what’s right. So, putting those things back in conflict again felt like the right way to open up ALASKA MOUNTAIN RESCUE.
You can pick up the first book in the series either as a standalone in K-9 DEFENSE or in a specially-priced duo book with Elle James’s Six Minutes to Midnight in VALIANT TRACKER. ALASKA MOUNTAIN RESCUE hits stores on December 29 and is available to pre-order now! You can also enter to win a copy at Fresh Fiction!
Publishers Weekly bestselling author ELIZABETH HEITER likes her suspense to feature strong heroines, chilling villains, psychological twists, and a little bit (or a lot!) of romance. Her research has taken her into the minds of serial killers, through murder investigations, and onto the FBI Academy’s shooting range. Her novels have been published in more than a dozen countries and translated into eight languages; they've also been shortlisted for the HOLT Medallion, the Daphne Du Maurier award, the National Readers' Choice award and the Booksellers' Best award and won the RT Reviewers' Choice award.
The heroine of Elizabeth's Profiler novels was called "one of the most amazing characters created in print" by Fresh Fiction. Her novels have received praise from Lee Child, J.T. Ellison, Jeffery Deaver, Tess Gerritsen, R.L. Stine, Allison Brennan, Laura Griffin, Suzanne Brockmann, Hank Phillippi Ryan and Zoë Sharp.
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