As a volunteer for Timber Creek Search and Rescue, Gracie responds to a call out for a car that’s gone over the side of a treacherous mountain road. The crash, which Gracie quickly suspects is no accident, proves to be one in an escalating and deadly series of events that lead her right back to Camp Ponderosa, a church-owned camp where she works as Program Director. As Gracie probes more deeply into the dark secrets at the camp, she unearths a hidden world of illegal activities, including murder…and finds herself going head-to-head with desperate perpetrators who will do anything to silence her forever.
One question I’m asked a lot, mostly by women, is what it’s
like to be a woman on Search and Rescue.
Some teams have a lot of women members; some not so many.
Sometimes this is due to the normal ebb and flow of membership of a volunteer
team, sometimes to the demographics of the community it serves and from which
the team draws its members, sometimes, in my opinion, to how women on the team (and
women in general) are treated.
In my Search and Rescue mystery series, Gracie Kinkaid is
one of the only women on Timber Creek Search and Rescue. An excerpt from
“Zero-Degree Murder,” the first book in the series: “Ordinarily ten men to one woman might be a
to-die-for ratio. But more often than not, Gracie found that working with so
many Manly Men for so many hours, often days at a time, took its toll on her.
She could take only so much crotch arranging, and fart and blonde jokes before
she began to crave a bubble bath or painted her toenails petunia pink.”
On our team, while minimal allowances were made for women on
the mandatory physical fitness test, there was no difference in what was
required in all other aspects of team membership. To qualify as a SAR Technician,
Level II, as required by our team to operate in the field, we all had to pass
the same National Association for Search and Rescue written and field tests
which included the Incident Command System, tracking, basic survival, search
tactics, and land navigation and orienteering.
While operating on a team of mostly men, I never expected
anything from them that I wasn’t prepared and able to do for them. In other
words, I didn’t expect special treatment based on my gender. I held my own,
carried my own weight. I worked as hard as, sometimes a lot harder than, every
other member of the team. What I lacked in physical strength, I tried to more
than make up for in other ways:
training, knowledge, expertise, and commitment.
While on a mission, when lives, including our own, were at
stake, I depended on my teammates and they needed to be able to depend on me
for anything and everything.
One thing that I've grown to admire about the cozies, is the presence of a strong, independent woman. It thrills me to know that these characters are empowering women to be themselves and to take pride in being so independent and strong. That's one of the things that I absolutely adored about Gracie. She is the epitome of this, and her battles, while at times remarkably chauvinistic, are similar to those that we, as women, encounter every single day. And boy, it sure is a relief to see characters like Gracie!
The storyline itself is also creative and fun. It's thrilling, and as Gracie uncovers secrets and clues, I frantically turned the pages, eager to know what happens next. It's a fantastic mystery with a few twists and turns. It's educational (as I had no idea what all went in to a search and rescue mission team), and it's clever. I cannot wait to continue reading this amazing series!
Rating: 5 stars
I received a copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. All conclusions reached are my own.
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