The Last Woman in the Forest

Diane Les Becquets is not an author I am familiar with but is a good writer who weaves a complex tale. The killer is obvious almost from the beginning, but it doesn't diminish the suspense. The protagonist is an unusual one. She's 26-year old Marian Engstrom, whose peripatetic existence as a "conservation gypsy" on one quest after another to save the environment. But when she joins a conservation study in Alberta, and starts working with rescue dogs trained to find scat for various species conservation projects, she feels like she has finally found her true passion, i.e., as a conservation canine handler. Already an avid outdoorswoman, the author did a lot of research with the Center for Consrvation Biology at the University of Washington, the Conservation Canines organization, and with Working Dogs for conservation in Bozeman, Montana. So we learn a lot about scat detection and analysis as a way to survey various species of animals in their wild habitats.
Marian's love for dogs threads through the story as does the recent loss of her lover, Tate Matthias, the man who trained her to be a dog handler. He was fatally mauled by a bear while working on another project to a bear attack. When Tate's sister comes to claim his body and belongings, certain inconsistencies begin to surface, leading Marian  to question her relationship with Tate. Desperate to clear her mind about Tate, she contacts a retired forensic psychologist about a series of murders in the same areas where Tate had worked. As she reconstructs her history with Tate to the psychologist, Nick Shephard, more and more discrepancies in Tate's personal history come to light. He lied to Marian about where he was born, who his parents were, where he went to college, and maybe about where he was at the times when the women were murdered. Marian does not want to believe that she could have been so badly misled. And throughout the story, we get hints that someone is stalking Marian. But Tate is dead, isn't he? The settings and the wildlife are lovingly rendered so this will appeal to those who also love the wilderness, as long as you have a strong stomach for the evil that humans can do to one another.  Reviews from Publishers Weekly and Kirkus.