Scent of the Missing: Love and Partnership with a Search and Rescue Dog

A wonderfully touching look at canine search and rescue teams straight from the source...both handler AND dog...SCENT OF THE MISSING takes you behind the scenes of the events that draw their attention. From the head lining stories of national tragedies to the small town disappearances big in their own way, the reader is welcomed into this "special club" and given a front row seat to the highs and lows experienced in their daily calls to work. You get to meet teams with years of experience as well as see one pup's growth (Puzzle) from percocious puppy to certified search and rescue dog...with all the antics along the way. Though Puzzle only truly gets into her first actual search at book's end, the journey to get to that said search is a story in and of itself making this a memorable read. Highly recommended for those pet lovers as well as anyone wanting a better understanding of all the work that goes into creating a successful search and rescue team...

The title and cover photo really says it all for this one. Scent of the Missing is a memoir by Susannah Charleson about her experiences doing search and rescue work with dogs. Search and rescue is a labor of love and you can tell from the writing that this is Charleson's passion. The story alternates between her experiences as a field assistant and her time training up her own puppy to become certified as a SAR dog and handler. The story is heartwarming and interesting as I learned about SAR in general, which I'd only had very basic knowledge of. I really admire the people who volunteer for this line of work - it's grueling and not for the faint of heart.

Fascinating and very well written account of the life of an SAR dog handler, from her decision to become a handler to finding the right dog to learning what it takes to do SAR. Engrossing read, which I highly recommend.

This is primarily the story of Puzzle, but there are also bits and pieces about her handler (and the author). The author has been helping with search-and-rescue of missing humans for a while. She helps with the SAR dogs that are sometimes called out. She eventually decides she would like to be the handler of the one of the dogs, herself, so she finds a golden retriever puppy and trains her. Interspersed with stories of Puzzle’s training, the author shares stories of various searches she has been on.

This was very interesting, I thought. The entire training and certification process was interesting and I also found the search stories interesting: toddlers, elderly, teenagers, also searching after disasters… I do wonder, though, how the trainers can have jobs, but still go running when they are called to help.

A book that delves into the world of rescue dogs and their owner/trainers. Good solid storytelling by a woman who has experienced rescue work first-hand. This work is not sappy or cutesy, but straightforward. However, at times the emotional aspect was a bit detached. Still, a good read, for dog lovers or those merely interested in what our canine companions are capable of doing, in order to assist humanity in peril.

Great book and excellent narrator (audiobook), highly recommend for dog lovers and "life" lovers. This book covers the author's own background in rescue work and her life in general, but the main focus is on the life of Puzzle, a Golden Retriever, as Puzzle is trained for Search and Rescue work. It's told in a casual and easy-flowing manner, though occasionally the style turns into a "stream of consciousness" rambling type book and, whoo-boy, and those are the areas that drag down the quality. Fortunately those digressions are few and 90% of the book is easy to read (or, in my case, listen to). The book is more of a well-connected group of stories and chapters could almost be written by different people: some chapters on dog training how-to, some on the author's personal issues, some are stories of rescues.

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."

The writing is really strong. Charleson describes her dogs and the various searches in vivid detail. She captures Puzzle's personality well, too.

However, the book has a very episodic feel. 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?

The trouble with memoir is that you can't change the facts. You can't make the story more dramatic by having Puzzle rescue a child from a well, if that's not what happened. On the other hand, I feel like this book could have been structured in such a way to make it a more cohesive story with a more satisfying ending.

This is a wonderful account of the care and hard work that goes into training and working with a SAR dog. I loved Charleson's descriptions of the different personalities and search styles of the dogs on her team and the cues their trainers learn to recognize. It's very engaging and well written.

Just plain terrific----I knew relatively nothing about these wonderful volunteers, human and canine. Can't wait to read the follow up to this book.

I started to read this a few years ago when i first came out but had to take it back to the post library after my husband got out of the military. Tracked down another copy and was glad I got to finish it! This is a great book for those interested in SAR as far as giving the reader a bit of an idea of the training involved. I loved the personal stories the author had to share, especially about the search where the team was being followed by donkeys and peacocks! Very unique dog book!

This book tells the fascinating story of training and working with a search-and-rescue dog. These animals are amazing! Check it out if you're a dog lover.

I enjoyed this book for several reasons. It is a great true story, it is inspiring , and it is well-written. It is also comforting to know that there are search and rescue teams out there who are available at all hours and will come virtually anywhere around the globe to help out. It was quite interesting to hear all the ins and outs of the job, and some of the things you wouldn't even consider when you think about how they select a team to work together. It is the story of a truly committed pair, and the way I feel about dogs, I believe there is a sensitive kinship with its handler that allows the dog to work at its hardest because it senses the importance of its quest. I recommend this book for people who are interested in this field and for those who just enjoy a feel-good story.

Susannah Charleson first found herself drawn to search and rescue through the air – piloting a small plane on searches for missing people and in disasters; but later, a dog lover and someone who found she liked the work “on the ground,” she decided to certify a search and rescue (SAR) dog with the Metro Area Rescue K9 unit in Dallas, Texas. Scent of the Missing is Susannah’s story of that journey with Golden Retriever Puzzle by her side.

From the first page of this heartfelt book, I was hooked – and not just because I too have traveled that long, difficult, heart-rending and rewarding journey from novice to mission ready SAR K9 handler, but because Charleson can write. She writes from the heart, but it is never sappy or overly emotional. Her prose is descriptive, intuitive, and honest. She writes about the big searches (like the search for human remains following the Columbia tragedy), but she also gives the reader details of the “small” searches, the searches that no one ever hears of except in the small town with a child or adult go missing. The stories she tells are the ones that every searcher remembers – the ones where the person is not found, or where they are found days later deceased. She shares the heavy weight of responsibility which all searchers carry, and the mix of emotions which accompany every search.

Reading Charleson’s book, I was drawn back to my own experiences of being a K9 handler – the long trainings in all kinds of weather and conditions, the 2:00 am “wake up call” when my pager would sound and I would be instantly on alert, the fatigue, the hard work…and ultimately the incredible partnership with my dog. Charleson effortlessly captures all of that in Scent of the Missing.

Dog lovers will love this book and fall in love with Puzzle, Charleson’s adorable, full of life Golden Retriever who takes to the field naturally and challenges her partner from the start. The bond that develops between handler and dog is beautiful and hard won. And, of course, for anyone who has worked in the field of search and rescue (or is considering volunteering for a team in their area) Scent of the Missing should be required reading. Despite my tears at times reading Charleson’s words, despite the fact that it made me ache with missing my own SAR dog Caribou, I am glad I read this beautifully written book.

Highly recommended.

Love & Partnership with a Search-and-Rescue Dog





“’You couldn’t pay me to do that’…she said, gesturing to the brochures and photographs we had…When I told her that we are an all-volunteer group, she gave me a little laugh and a doubtful twist of her head, and said, ‘You do this for fun?’”





Dog lovers will revel in this true story of a young woman who, after a career piloting her plane for law enforcement searches, makes the jump to a field assistant for canine search-and-rescue teams on the ground. Eventually she qualifies to train her own dog, a Golden Retriever named Puzzle, who emerges into a highly trained partner. They learn to read signs in the field and understand each other’s signals to accomplish work that can save lives and solve crimes.




Dogs have forty times more scent receptors than dogs and most of us cannot appreciate how a dog can trail a missing person. Because of this, skeptics abound even among law enforcement personnel. However, those who work with specially trained dogs in other fields, such as bomb and drug detection know the abilities of these specially trained dogs. Some dogs are can be trained to sense seizures approaching in epileptics or cancer in medical patients. A variety of classifications is explained in this text that shows the fascinating possibilities, many yet to be explored. Some dogs, like Puzzle, are trained to accept a pack and rappel line and are lowered down steep cliffs, literally hanging on a wire, while remaining calm and eager to continue their search.




“Air-scent dogs are frequently used…to find living victims. Trained to locate and follow the cloud of human scent made by the microscopic skin rafts we shed and odors we create just in the process of living… Tracking dogs, sometimes called a cold-scent dog, may follow both the scent in the air and scent that has fallen into foliage, objects, cement, or dirt in trail and can follow a path that is days or weeks old…”




“Cadaver dogs specifically recover deceased humans and locate skin, hair, bones, blood, and the indeterminate mix of scents made of semen, urine, sweat and the process of decomposition which has an evolving scent of its own.”




One of the most fascinating types of search canine is one classified as a HRD, a Human Remains Detection dog, who “may alert over graves from a century before. One of the most remarkable possibilities with a HRD dog occurs when humans are buried near the root structures of trees. HRD dogs may put up their paws and stretch to alert on the relevant tree, which exudes human scent as part of its photosynthesis and related processes.”




Besides participating in searches for Alzheimer patients and campers who become lost or wander off, crime victims, or those who have drowned, Susannah has also participated in the recovery of human remains from the space shuttle Columbia’s disaster. Dogs have been used in the recovery at Ground Zero, in tornado-ravaged country sides, and the 1995 bombing in Oklahoma City. The photo section in the center is moving, as many of the dogs discussed are shown, some with the people they saved. One picture that is especially touching is that of Skip Fernandez, a search-and-rescue handler, sleeping against a wall after working all night in the rubble of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. While he rests, his Golden Retriever is on his lap, still on duty protecting him.



This was an amazing read, especially in revealing the skills of animals that we often take for granted. As my Doberman sits on my lap snoring, I can hardly imagine her doing anything particularly useful, much less lifesaving! One caveat: some of the writing style felt a bit strained, with sentence fragments and punctuation missing in places. Initially these were a distraction, but as the book proceeds they were less noticeable. The amazing on-the-scene details took over, and it became the kind of book you want to share with others, especially dog lovers!

Did you know that working search & rescue with a dog is, for the most part, a volunteer position? I didn’t.

Did you know that a potential handler goes through months and months (maybe even years) of training before he or she is ready to even consider raising & training a dog to work with? I didn’t.

And did you know that, once a handler has acquired a dog to train, that dog AND the handler must go through months and months (again, maybe even years) of more training before the dog/handler team is ready to actually head out in the field on their first search? Remember — this is all volunteer. Again, I had no idea.

Scent of the Missing by Susannah Charleson is the autobiographical story of a handler and her partner, from before the partnership even began. I say story because it’s not a memoir, per se — both members of the team are still living — and it’s not strictly a detailing of either member’s life. Rather, Charleson tells the story of life before her partner, meeting her partner, training with her partner, and the maturation of both handler and dog to form a complete, trusting, bonded pair that could work together in the field.

It’s fascinating to see the level of commitment and dedication that both Charleson and her partner, a Golden named Puzzle, had to the job. From birth to present day, Puzzle was groomed to be a search dog (she showed search tendencies during the assessment tests… yes, assessments when she was only weeks old!), and it’s clear from Charleson’s story that the dog truly loved (I should say, loves… she’s still alive and working) her job and was meant to work search & rescue.

Though she downplays her own role in the book, it’s also evident that Charleson is an excellent handler, dedicated to search & rescue, and very in-tune with what it takes to make a potential working puppy into a full-fledged rescue dog. I found that Charleson came across as very humble in her position, and maybe that’s because of the nature of the work… but I think she’s to be highly commended for working such a difficult field and for giving her all to it.

My only question by the end of the book was, if this is all volunteer, how on earth is Charleson (or anyone working search & rescue, for that matter) making a living? They’re on call at all hours of the day and night, and sometimes searches can go on for days, so where is the income coming from? I would have liked to see a little more insight onto how working search affects the humans’ daily lives and how they balance family, paid work, volunteering, training, etc… but understandably, the book wasn’t about humans, it was about working with a dog. Still, I wonder…!

Finally, though every so often I took issue with what seemed to be an excessive projection of human thoughts & emotions onto the dogs mentioned (particularly Puzzle), I also realize that when you work so closely with an animal for an extended period of time, you see things & understand things about his or her movements and moods that others simply cannot see. So, while I didn’t always like the “human thoughts” given to Puzzle, I give Charleson the benefit of the doubt — after all, don’t we all speculate about our pets’ thoughts and emotions from time to time?

And you wouldn’t believe the emotional toll that search takes on the dogs, for that matter. But, rather than tell you about it, I’ll let you read the book and learn a few things for yourself. I love reading animal-related books that teach me something, both about the animal(s) and the human(s) who work with them, and this book was no exception. Canine search & rescue teams are incredibly hard working, and I honestly had no idea whatsoever about them before reading this book — not to mention how brilliant some dogs are when their brains are put to good use, given real challenges.

If you love animals, this is a great book for you to learn more about the intelligence of dogs. If you’re interested in law enforcement, rescue operations, or even human-animal relationships, this is also the book for you. If you love a good story about two souls discovering they were meant for each other, and the long journey toward that moment of discovery… here’s your story. Read, learn, and enjoy.

Finally an author who can write with a dog story worth telling has come along! In Scent of the Missing Susannah Charleson illuminates the often romanticized, but little known world of search and rescue dogs. She starts with her own introduction to the SAR, as a field assistant and finishes the book with an accounting of the training of her own SAR dog, Puzzle. If you are expecting sappy, feel-good accounts of rescues you may be disappointed. Susannah tells it like it is including the disappointments, heartbreak, and the rescues that may have been better staying unfound. Still, in the end, you will have a profound appreciation for the incredible work and dedication demanded of the handlers and dogs.

While SAR is a fascinating world, what really makes the book is Susannah's writing style. The book flows effortlessly and the vocabulary and subject matter are sophisticated. I learned a lot from this book and enjoyed myself along the way. I can only hope that Susannah continues the story of Puzzle!

I really enjoyed reading this book. For once a book about dogs in which the dog doesn't die! It was fascinating to me to learn about how the Search and Rescue dogs are trained, and how much devotion it takes to do it. I especially enjoyed the tales of the Poms at the same time. (In addition to training her SAR dog, the author fosters a houseful of Pomeranians, and she makes it all sound like jolly good fun.) Having recently lost my last dog, it helped ease the transition to a dog-less household. (Various reasons, we can't get more right away.) This is a must-read for those of you who enjoy reading about dogs.

This is a very engaging read about the journey of Susannah Charleston and her puppy, Puzzle, working toward their Search and Rescue certification. The journey begins while Susannah is still working as a SAR field assistant, helping other dog-and-handler teams. When she's ready to train a SAR of her own, she finds Puzzle and they begin a wonderful relationship.

This book is very well written. The pacing is much better than your typical "best dog in the world" book, since there are chapters focusing on the SAR events intermixed with the chapters focusing on Puzzle herself. Puzzle has an actual story here -- her efforts to become SAR certified -- so it does keep you reading to see what happens next. Susannah's style is very conversational. I enjoyed her obvious love for Puzzle and her SAR teammates, her wry sense of humor, and her honesty about fears of not being good enough.

Thank you, Susannah and Puzzle, for the hard work you do. And thank you for sharing your story with us!

This is a story of Search and Rescue dogs but also of life with a golden retriever puppy named Puzzle who is being trained for SAR work, of living in a household full of rescued Pomeranians, and of all the training that goes into making a successful SAR dog and handler. There are also sad stories about why some of the author's rescued dogs needed to be rescued in the first place, and it never fails to amaze me how thoughtless and cruel people can be at their worst.

On the flight home after picking up puppy Puzzle, the puppy is sleeping upside down in the author's arms, leading to a favorite quote:

“Gravity has pulled down the puppy's ears and lips and bared her fangs. Her eyes are open but unseeing, rolled up in her head with the whites exposed. It's not a good look. It's not even canine – more Hell-Spawn Bunny of the Undead.”

For the most part I enjoyed the writing style. I would have liked more rescue stories and I would have liked a little bit less detail about individual rescue and training sessions, a little less repetition. The amount of training required for certification surprised me. The chapter on recovery after the Columbia disaster was touching and heartbreaking. I admire these volunteers who spend countless hours and a great deal of their own money to train and work these dogs, going into dangerous situations to save someone or even to find remains when it's too late to save. While this might not be an all-time favorite book for me, I think dog lovers will enjoy it.

There were parts of this book I really liked, the rescues and the way the author injects humor in the middle of what sometimes seems like endless paragraphs of information. There were also parts that really bored me, namely the endless paragraphs mentioned above regarding training and technical stuff. Being a dog mom myself, I didn't find the training particularily interesting. The eating of chairs, the car sickness, the dog fights, I've been there!

The author strays from the subject too often, going on about storms and fire alarms. Whereas I thought this would be a book with stories of her rescues, the actual rescue stories were few and far between and the book became mostly about Puzzle, her retriever and the training and certification tests. Puzzle herself doesn't participate in an actual rescue until the very last chapter, leaving me feeling rather cheated.

Not bad, but not great.