You can't make the story more dramatic by having Puzzle rescue a child from a well, if that's not what happened. The trouble with memoir is that you can't change the facts. So many searches are described that by the time we get to the final search, it feels anticlimactic, because (to borrow a phrase from my own writing teacher), all the searches are given the same "narrative weight." Why should we care about this last search any more than the dozen we've already read about? However, the book has a very episodic feel.
She captures Puzzle's personality well, too. Charleson describes her dogs and the various searches in vivid detail. I had high hopes for this book, based on the compelling description on the back cover (which is not the same as the description on Amazon, I notice): "Between Susannah's initial trepidation and Puzzle's outsized puppy antics, readers are swept along on their adventures together as they learn to pursue the rescue and recovery of human victims fallen prey to crime, misadventure or catastrophe." All dog lovers and people interested in training service dogs should read this book.” -Temple Grandin, author of Animals Make Us Human Read more “A riveting view of both the human animal bond and the training of search and rescue dogs. Scent of the Missing is the story of Charleson’s adventures with Puzzle as they search for a lost teen an Alzheimer’s patient wandering in the cold and signs of the crew amid the debris of the space shuttle Columbia disaster-all while unraveling the mystery of the bond between humans and dogs. Once she qualified to train a dog of her own, Charleson adopted Puzzle-a smart, spirited Golden Retriever puppy who exhibited unique aptitudes as a working dog, but was a bit less interested in the role of compliant house pet. While the team worked long hours for nonexistent pay and often heart-wrenching results, Charleson discovered the joy of working in partnership with a canine friend and the satisfaction of using their combined skills to help her fellow human beings. Susannah, a dog lover and pilot with search experience herself, was so moved by the image that she decided to volunteer with a local canine team, plunging herself into an astonishing new world.
In the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing, Susannah Charleson’s attention was caught by a newspaper photograph of a canine handler, his exhausted face buried in the fur of his search-and-rescue dog. A “haunting meditation on trust, hope and love” by a woman who adopts and trains a Golden Retriever puppy to become a search-and-rescue dog ( People).
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