Coffee with a canine: Susannah Charleson & Puzzle

This weekend's featured couple at Coffee with a Canine: Susannah Charleson and Puzzle.

Charleson, on her new book, Scent of the Missing:

Scent of the Missing: Love and Partnership with a Search and Rescue Dog (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010) follows my journey with Puzzle -- from her puppyhood through certification tests and first search. It's a love-and-adventure story of how we came together as partners in the field and out of it. The book also includes individual searches that take readers into the field beside dog-and-handler teams looking for missing persons - from children thought to have run away to confused Alzheimer's patients to the astronauts of space shuttle Columbia.[read on]

Among the early praise for Scent of the Missing:

In this haunting meditation on trust, hope and love, Charleson chronicles her work as a handler with Dallas’ canine search-and-rescue team. A mesmerizing close-up of dogs trained to sniff for human scent, the book also celebrates Charleson’s extraordinary partnership with Puzzle, her golden retriever. Whether describing finding a missing child in an air duct or searching for survivors amid the debris of the Columbia space shuttle, Charleson’s prose is palpably alive, showing how each job, like life, entails placing “one foot before another, hoping for good but prepared for grief, and following the dog ahead anyhow.”
--Caroline Leavitt, People Magazine

Humans have long used dogs, with their remarkable scenting abilities, to find lost, injured, or dead people. However, recent tragedies and disasters—9/11, Hurricane Katrina—have brought search-and-rescue recovery to the forefront. Charleson introduces us to this world as she trains her dog Puzzle to work with Dallas’s elite Metro Area Rescue K9 unit. Interspersed with stories of such routine activities as housebreaking and walking on a leash are the hold-your-breath moments when the author describes actual rescue/recovery missions such as the shuttle Columbia explosion. VERDICT This memorable tribute to the dedication of these dog-handler teams is an essential read for dog lovers.
--Library Journal (starred review)

Watch the Scent of the Missing book trailer, narrated by Susannah Charleson and featuring Team Puzzle and the Mark-9 search and rescue team of Dallas/Ft. Worth, Texas.

Visit the official Scent of the Missing website.

Read--Coffee with a Canine: Susannah Charleson and Puzzle.

--Marshal Zeringue