It’s Halloween in Vermont, winter is coming, and five humans, two dogs and a cat are a crowd in Mercy Carr’s small cabin. She needs more room --- and she knows just the place: Grackle Tree Farm, with 30 acres of woods and wetlands and a Victorian manor to die for. They say it’s haunted by the ghosts of missing children and lost poets and a murderer or two, but Mercy loves it anyway. Even when Elvis finds a dead body in the library. A coded letter found on the victim points to a hidden treasure that may be worth a fortune (if it’s real). She and Captain Thrasher conduct a search of the old place --- and end up at the wrong end of a Glock. A masked man shoots Thrasher, and she and Elvis must take him down before he murders them all.

When Mercy Carr’s grandmother, Patience, marries her longtime beau, Claude Renault, at the five-star Lady’s Slipper Inn, it promises to be the destination wedding of the year. Just as the four-day extravaganza is due to begin, the inn’s spa director, Bodhi St. George, disappears --- and Mercy’s mother, Grace, sends Mercy and Elvis to find him. But what they discover instead is a stranger skewered by a pitchfork in the barn on the goat farm where St. George lived. As Mercy tries to figure out who the victim is and where St. George is hiding, the bride and groom’s estranged relations gather for the first of the pre-wedding festivities. Long-buried rivalries and resentments surface --- and Mercy realizes that they’re all keeping secrets that could tear both families apart.

When her late grandfather’s dying deputy calls Mercy to his side, she and Elvis inherit the cold case that haunted him --- and may have killed him. But finding Beth Kilgore 20 years after she disappeared is more than a lost cause. It’s a Pandora’s box releasing a rain of evil on the very people Mercy and Elvis hold most dear. The timing couldn’t be worse when the man who murdered her grandfather escapes from prison and a fellow Army vet turns up claiming that Elvis is his dog, not hers. With her grandmother Patience gone missing, and Elvis’ future uncertain, Mercy faces the prospect of losing her most treasured allies, the only ones she believes truly love and understand her. She needs help, and that means forgiving Vermont Game Warden Troy Warner long enough to enlist his aid.

Nine-year-old Henry is lost in the woods. Again. Only this time he sees something terrible. When a young woman is found shot through the heart with a fatal arrow, former Army MP Mercy Carr thinks that something is murder. But Henry, a math genius whose autism often silences him when he should speak up most, is not talking. Now there’s a murderer hiding among the hunters in the forest --- and Mercy and her retired bomb-sniffing dog, Elvis, must team up with their crime-solving friends, game warden Troy Warner and search-and-rescue dog Susie Bear, to find the killer. When an early-season blizzard hits the mountains, cutting them off from the rest of the world, the race is on to solve the crime, apprehend the murderer and keep the boy safe until the snowplows get through.

After their last deployment, when she got shot, her fiancé Martinez got killed and his bomb-sniffing dog Elvis got depressed, soldier Mercy Carr and Elvis were both sent home. Together the two former military police march off their grief mile after mile in the beautiful remote Vermont wilderness. Even on the Fourth of July weekend, it’s just another walk in the woods for Mercy and Elvis --- until the dog alerts to explosives and they find a squalling baby abandoned near a shallow grave filled with what appear to be human bones. U.S. Game Warden Troy Warner and his search and rescue Newfoundland Susie Bear respond to Mercy’s 911 call, and the four must work together to track down a missing mother, solve a cold-case murder, and keep the citizens of Northshire safe.