Dog writer Holly Winter trains, shows, and loves her own Alaskan malamutes and helps rescue others in need of protection. When she learns that a malamute is for sale at a pet shop, Holly visits Puppy Luv, where owner Diane Sweet is doing a brisk Valentine's Day business. Hours later, Diane is the victim of a gruesome murder. Meanwhile, Holly takes responsibility for a rescue malamute, the trusting and overwhelmingly lovable Missy. Before long, however,...

Detective Daniel Parks catches the case of Destiny Millbrook, who hit a mugger with a baseball bat.

As PI Holly Winter, a dog trainer and writer in Cambridge, Massachusetts, reads of the unsolved murder of a publisher two decades earlier, she sees a clue in the publisher's dog being tied up while the deed was done. Obviously the killer didn't like dogs, which makes him a candidate for Holly's sleuthing.

Holly Winter, suffering from amnesia after a serious fall, discovers that she has two malamutes, she is a guest on Mount Desert Island, Maine, and that her fall wasn't an accident.