Conservation Dogs and Deadly Trade by Sara Driscoll

We talk about the real work of conservation dogs in Hawaii and how they inspired the latest FBI K-9 novel by Sara Driscoll. 

By Zazie Todd, PhD

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Conservation dogs and Deadly Trade, the latest FBI-K9 book by Sara Driscoll

K-9 handler Meg Jennings can never walk away from her job, even amid her Hawaiian Islands honeymoon, where she and her search-and-rescue black Lab encounter a double threat from wildlife poachers and Mother Nature.

Deadly Trade is the latest FBI-K9 book by Sara Driscoll and it is hot off the press, having just been published yesterday. We caught up with Sara--real name Jen J. Danna--to find out about the real-life conservation canines in Hawaii who inspired the book, and learn more about Hawk, the fictional FBI K9 and other working dogs in the book.

We talked about:

•     The work of conservation dogs and what they do on the Hawaiian islands
•     Why Sara was inspired to write about conservation canines in Deadly Trade
•     How to write about dogs as characters in their own right
•     The kind of training that Hawk, the FBI canine, and the conservation dogs in the book would go through in real life
•     How the dogs influence the success of the mission
•     How Hawk picks up on things his handler, Meg, can't
•     Why Sara chose to write about endangered birds
•     What it's like writing with a co-author
•     And as always, we ask for a book recommendation!

Sara Driscoll is the pen name of Jen J. Danna, coauthor of the Abbott and Lowell Forensic Mysteries and author of the FBI K-9 Mysteries and NYPD Negotiators series. After over 30 years in infectious diseases research, Jen hung up her lab coat to concentrate on her real love—writing “exceptional” thrillers (Publishers Weekly). She is a member of the Crime Writers of Canada and lives with her husband and four rescued cats outside of Toronto, Ontario. 

Learn more about Sara Driscoll on her websites, saradriscollauthor.com and https://jenjdanna.com/.

Also mentioned in this episode:

•     Away to Me by Patricia McConnell PhD will be published in February 2026 and is available for pre-order now
•     You can hear Patricia McConnell talking about the book at 2024's Bark! Fest, which is available as a previous episode of this podcast and video: Dogs, trauma, and both ends of the leash with Patricia McConnell PhD
•     Learn about the work of historical scent detection dogs in an episode with Kim Cooper and Cat Warren  
•     The Hawaiian crow, the ‘Alalā, is described here, and you can learn about the ‘Alalā project

Highlights of the conversation about Deadly Trade

Z: Your FBI K-9 series often shows off many different kinds of working dogs, like Hawk, the search and rescue Labrador. But Deadly Trade actually focuses on conservation dogs.

So can you just tell us something about what conservation dogs do?

J: Yeah, conservation dogs, that was a new kind of dog for me. And when I found out about it, it was perfect because it fits right into this. You know, the story that I was telling.

Hawaii is the extinction capital of the world, and they say that they have lost more species than exist overall. It's really sort of a tragic kind of thing. 

Get Deadly Trade by Sara Driscoll

And it's an archipelago. It's way out in the middle of nowhere. So the only way that you get species introduction is by invasive species. There's a couple of kinds of ants that come across on boats. You can have rats come across, cats and mongoose, like all of these have been added in as invasive creatures. 

And so they use conservation dogs to both look for the invasive creatures as well as to, As to protect, you know, the natural wildlife of the islands. So, for instance, if a boat is coming in, they will send out conservation dogs who will be able to smell the yellow crazy ants and the fire ants and the rats and sort of identify those before they have a chance to get off the boat. 

There is something called devil weed, which is like a very invasive weed, that they will send the dogs out, they will find the weed, and then the people who are with them, the handlers that are with them, are trained how to remove the weed completely from that area. 

And then there's the coconut rhinoceros beetle, which can get into pineapple trees and banana trees and coconut trees, obviously, and can kill the tree, but the dog can smell the coconut rhinoceros beetle. Before it can do too much damage, they can treat the tree and bring it back from the brink. 

So in this case, we're looking at bird conservation, and in Hawaii, primarily, it's used for seabirds. A lot of the seabirds are literally out on the water all the time. They only come back into land when they are nesting, and then they will find a crevice. In the Hawaiian landscape, there's a lot of lava fields that go right down to the ocean, and there's a lot of natural crevices and sort of like little lava tubes and all of these kind of things.

And that's what the birds use as nests. And so they can get in, like, six, eight feet into these nests. So there's no way for a human to sort of look into the nest and say, look, there's a bird's nest. But the dogs can smell them. And so then they can set up night vision to watch these nests. Then the humans can help out to make sure that these nests are undisturbed because of the cats and the rats and the mongoose and all of this kind of thing.

So that's what a lot of the Hawaiian conservation dogs do, is that they help identify the breeding grounds of these seabirds. But in this case, they can also identify forest birds, and there are a lot of forest birds that are going extinct. 

And so in this case, Makoa, who is the Australian shepherd conservation dog, that's his main thing is birds, and so he knows the difference in the smell of a seabird from a forest bird. They say that one has a musky, fishy smell and the other one has a musky, sweet smell.

And so what we're looking at in this case, for this particular story is a wildlife trafficking of birds that are on the verge of extinction. They are trying to find the wildlife traffickers by actually finding the bird areas first and then trying to meet them in that spot. So Makoa is great for this. He finds where these nests are. 

But it's interesting because you've got two live tracking dogs, live scent tracking dogs who are looking for the people, and then you have a dog who's looking for the birds. And so sometimes they're all on the same pathway. And then sometimes you'll see Hawk and Lacy will go one way and Makoa will go another way because he's tracking the nest, they're tracking the humans, and in the end, they actually meet up in the final spot.

K: So did you say that conservation dogs as a thing was new to you for this book?

J: It was new to me for this book, yeah. Mostly because I write thrillers, so I really sort of concentrate on the law enforcement angle. So, you know, drug sniffing dogs, bomb sniffing dogs, decomp [decomposition] dogs, that kind of thing. So this more natural sort of tracking dog was new to me, I will admit.

K: Did you do a deep dive into conservation dogs in general? Because I know we hear about them, you know, in the dog training world, but I think I've mostly heard about them on the mainland United States.

J: Okay. I was gonna say the research that I did on them was mostly with Hawaii because that was really what I was looking at. And I mean, every area is going to have slightly different training for those dogs because they're looking for something very specific.

Z: What inspired you to write about working dogs in the books?

J: Well, this is kind of funny. I had a partner, Ann Vanderlaan, who has unfortunately passed on, and we wrote a forensic mystery series together first. And then we were sort of thinking, well, what are we going to move on to next? And my agent had lunch with an editor from Kensington, and he gave her a list of things that he was looking for.

And one of the things he was looking for was a police procedure with a canine aspect. Well, Ann first started out raising standard schnauzers and then had moved on to rescuing pit bulls and training them into therapy dogs. And we sort of looked at each other and went, well, we can do this, because Ann had all of the dog experience.

And so we said, yeah, we could do this. And so we came up with the outline for the first three books in the series, which, funnily enough, book one was what it was, book two was what it was, and book three ended up being book nine. We did get it in there. Unfortunately, by that point, I got it in there because Ann was no longer with us. 

But so Ann was fantastic when it came to this sort of thing, because she was really the brains behind the dog. And she took one of her therapy dogs and they did scent work classes and he ribboned in scent work and all of this kind of stuff, because we wanted to make sure that we had our procedures down properly for, you know, the working dog life and how they would get out and do their searches. 

So that was how we kind of got into that. It was just sort of one of those... I mean, publishing is a business. It was one of those sort of practical things where someone said, you know, can you do this? And we went, yeah, we could do that. And then we sort of made sure that our skills matched what was needed.

K: So Meg, your FBI agent, has a close relationship with her canine partner, Hawk. And we've asked this of other authors who've written fiction about dogs, because I think writing fiction about dogs and not making it really either treacly or making the dog into just like a plot device is hard, so to writing the dog to honor their dog-ness, but to also move the story along. 

So how did you come about writing about a dog in this way? So that it's convincing, but doesn't pull you out of the narrative?

J: Well, and it doesn't. There are some authors who actually give the dog a point of view, and I did not want to do that. I didn't feel that we could sort of speak to that well enough because, I mean, really do we know what's going on in their heads? We've maybe got some ideas, but we don't really know.

So what we decided to do was just to sort of show Hawk's communication by his connection with Meg so she can read him. And this is how these handler teams really work, is that they know their dogs inside and out. They spend all their times with their dogs. 

Like, for instance, in Deadly Trade, she's on her honeymoon. She has the dog with her. Like they don't just put the dog in a kennel and go away for a two week vacation. These handler dog pairings are so close that they are together all the time. And luckily Meg has a husband who completely understands this and isn't jealous of the dog, which really helps.

But that close connection is how we get Hawk's point of view, in that she can read him so well through his body language. You know, just even how he sniffs. Like, when a dog is actually scenting, their breathing is different than when they are just breathing. Right? So you can tell what they're doing and sort of read what they're thinking just based on body language and their own actions.

Z: I'm interested in the kind of training that the dogs have to do to do this work. So you've got Hawk, he's like a search and rescue type dog and you've got the conservation dogs. What kind of training would they have had to go through? And is it similar for them both or is it quite different?

J: I mean, I would guess that it's similar. We don't kind of get into the training in this. I mean when you've only got 85,000 words to tell a story and when Lone Wolf starts, Hawk is two and they've already been at it for, you know, six months, eight months, that kind of thing. So they're already into it. 

But I mean the training would be similar. It would only be sort of like positive reinforcement training. And you know, I mean the most important thing with this is finding a dog that has the correct personality for this particular job. I mean this is search and rescue and not a patrol dog. So the aggression factor is not top of mind, but the drive certainly is.

And I mean Hawk's personality, he's sort of like a long distance runner. Like he is sort of like the slow and steady wins the race kind of dog. He is just, he's in there for the long term and he will just keep going. He's very steady. You only see his aggression level rise when Meg is in danger and that's when it sort of rises to the fore.

But yeah, I mean they would have gone through sort of all the standard training that any of these same dogs would have been. You find the button to push for that particular dog is the reward, food is the reward, a toy, you know, always positive reinforcement.

And I mean, she's not an FBI agent, she's an FBI contractor. So she owns the dog. And they sort of contract them out as a pair. But even any FBI employee, they have to go for continuing eds. So in Still Waters for example, they go and do some decomp training, some water training, because their comment is, you know, if we're tracking somebody and we get to the edge of a lake and the trail dies at the end of the edge of a lake, we're stuck. We can't go anywhere. The dogs don't know what to do. So they then get into that.

It's maybe stretching the truth a little bit because realistically speaking, there are decomp dogs and then there are the live find dogs. But, you know, it's another scent to identify.

And decomp is kind of a sliding scale. Like you start off as live and then you die and then you work your way towards decomp. So somewhere in between, it's still smells like both. And so we did get into some training in that book because that was a new skill for them to learn.

Z: Thank you. We actually had an episode recently where we talked to Kim Cooper and Cat Warren about historic human remains dogs, and that was really fascinating to hear about. And I'm going to drop a link to that in the show notes from this.

But I also like how you're mentioning earlier books in the series. So I think listeners should know that if they read this book and love it, which I'm sure they will, there is a back catalog to go through here, which is very good to know about.

J: It is book 10. But I too try to write every book so that you can jump in at that point and then if you really love it, you want to go back to book one.

K: Yeah, I like it when there's a lot of books in a series because then it feels like the people become your friends, but they're like low effort friends.

J: Well, you know, I'm very much in this sort of write what you like to read kind of camp. And so I love sort of big ensemble books where you start off with sort of like the core characters, but then extra characters get added in and then you get to see those secondary characters grow and you just sort of feel like you're part of a big family. And yeah, it's sort of a big found family kind of moment. 

K: I love that for sure. So in this book, a lot of the central plot and a lot of the descriptions and the feel of it really revolves around the Pu'u Maka'ala Reserve. So I'm not familiar with Hawaii at all. I've never been. So how did you know about the place as a Canadian? 

J: And our conservation dogs use that in real life, you know.

Yeah, well, I had never been to Hawaii as well, which is why when I sort of planned this book out, someone in the book world that I know had sort of given me an idea about the Kilauea eruption that had happened a few years back. And I sort of thought, well, they just got married, you know, they could go to Hawaii. It's in FBI jurisdiction. 

So that kind of got me started on the idea. So then I wanted to sort of delve into sort of what would be a good area. You know, I figured out what the crime would be, what would be a good area to sort of figure this out.

And there are a bunch of websites where you can see maps of what birds are endangered and where. Where you can find them. And so I basically picked an area where there was the most overlap, and that was Pu'u Maka'ala. And it was an amazing area.

And I looked at pictures of it and I went, I can't write this without actually going through that area. So my husband and I went last November, and we spent a week in Hawaii learning all about volcanoes and walking, actually hiking this remote fern forest, which was amazing.

A tough hike too, because the descriptions of how there isn't really a path are 100% accurate. There really isn't path. And the whole time we were going, I was just so worried that we were going to get lost and that someone was going to have to come and find us. You know, like, that would be so embarrassing.

But, yeah, so that really helped because it's hard to sort of just, you know, from pictures to really pick up what the atmosphere is like. This overwhelming humidity and everything is so close, but the birds are right overhead and you can tell there's stuff in the foliage around you that's scurrying out of your way, but you don't know what it is. And I mean, it's a beautiful, beautiful spot.

But yeah, I mean, Hawaii is just a site is kind of... It's a little bit challenging because it is a quite large area, especially Hawaii, the actual island itself, I mean, just to go from one place to the next, if you have to drive across the island, you have to take this one single road that goes in between Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa and that it's like an hour and a half from side to side.

And the resort that they stayed in was the resort that we stayed in. And that drive that they did back and forth was the drives that we did back and forth because one side of the island's very, very rainy and the other side is not. So we wanted to stay on the dry side, but because that side of the island is so rainy, you get these rich, verdant forests. 

And it's a great spot to sort of set a book. Very different from any of the other places that I'd set any of the other books in the series. And when you're on book 10, you want to try and keep things fresh.

Z: I enjoyed the description of the trail right at the beginning of the book because I haven't been to this part of Hawaii, but I have been for a hike in Hawaii where I was like, this is not my idea of a trail. This is a bit much.

J: Exactly. There's almost no trail.

Z: Yes.

So in terms of the mission, the dogs are really important. How does the use of both the conservation dog and Hawk impact the success of the mission in the book, without giving away too many spoilers?

J: Well, how that works in this book is how it works in all of the books, is that none of the stories would move forward without the dogs. The dogs are the key.

I mean, it's the dog handler pairing that's really the key. But you couldn't send the handler out there on their own and get these sort of results.

So everything is based around the dog. It's all based around their amazing skills and how they can, you know, find a scattering of skin cells and, and follow it or, or use, you know, use air scenting techniques to run in and through a scent cone until they can get it down to a single spot. It's really amazing. 

So between the live find dogs and the conservation dogs, I mean, just basically they're looking for different things, but it's very much the same sort of techniques that they're using. But the whole series would not stand without the dogs, because they are the key to finding all the answers in every case.

K: Earlier you mentioned that the dog's personality, like the dog's motivation, is really important for training these dogs. So how would you describe Hawk's personality and how does that impact his role in your books and in this story?

J: Yeah, so like I said, he's the long distance runner dog. He's the loyal dog. He's really steady. Maybe some people might find him kind of boring. Like, he's very level.

One of the other dogs in the book, Lacy, she's the anxious dog and she's got a lot of drive and she's got a great nose. But she does tend to get anxious in some of the scenarios where they're searching. For instance, in Summit's Edge, they have to rope down the dogs down a cliff attached to the backs of the handlers so that they are sort of spinning in midair, and where Hawk is just like, okay, let's do it. You know, that kind of thing. Lacy was sort of panicking because, you know, this is very unfamiliar for her. 

So Hawk is sort of like the dependable, you know, just keeps going to the ends of the earth kind of dog. But we. We see a lot of different personalities. There's four core dogs in the book, although two are the main dogs, Lacy, the German shepherd, and Hawk, the Black Lab.

But we also have Rocco, who is a border collie, and then we have Theo, who is a bloodhound. And so they've all got different personalities because dogs have different personalities.

Z: Yes, very true.

So sometimes Hawk picks up on danger or he senses things that Meg isn't aware of. Can you give us an example of that from the book?

J: Well, in this book, this one has a real different one, because part of it, as you sort of said in your intro, there's two risks that are happening in this book.

There's the wildlife traffickers themselves, who are quite dangerous and come armed, and then there's Mother Nature, because at this particular moment in the book, Mauna Loa is thinking of erupting after 35 years. And most volcanoes erupt about every five years. And so this has been 35 years. And so they know it's coming. 

But what happens before a volcanic eruption is that you get tremors because you have what's called a caldera, which is where, you know, sort of with the top of a volcano, as we all kind of think of it, where there's bubbling lava and that kind of thing, but there's a lot of lava underneath. And some of the lava will go lateral, it'll go sideways, and as it's carving its way through the rock further and further, you get tremors. 

And so those tremors are like a harbinger of what is to come. But Hawk can always sense them coming before Meg or her husband Todd can. And so in the very first chapter, second chapter, the first time that they're out in Pu'u Maka'ala, like he stops and his fur goes up and like he sort of has a reaction like he would if Meg was in danger.

And she's really confused and then the tremor hits and so he's able to hear and feel this coming long before she can. So he's sort of an early warning, you know, he's a great protector when she's in trouble. But in this case he's an early warning system to Mother Nature, you know, having a temper tantrum.

K: Really the sense of sort of impending danger started to become quite the thread.

J: Well, yeah, because then it comes to the point where they're not sure, is the danger from the traffickers or is the danger from the volcano?

K: Yeah. So in my non dog work as an anthropologist, I work as a northern anthropologist and I actually do a lot of work in the species at risk domain. So I was interested to read about the species at risk aspect of this book and the conservation aspects of this book.

So what made you sort of decide to look at species at risk and birds at risk in Hawaii? What brought that up for you or into this story for you?

J: I sort of came at it from the side because I had decided that I wanted to set it in Hawaii because it was like a novel environment. Again, when you're on book 10, you're really trying to mix things up as much as possible. And so I really wanted to set it in Hawaii because it was a novel environment.

But just because of the way Hawaii is, the federal crimes there are actually sort of few and far between. So this is always a challenge with this series is that not only does it need to be a case that the dogs should be involved in, but it has to be a federal case so that it's an FBI dog that's involved and not, you know, like a local dog or a state dog.

It has to be the federal dog. So I then you then sort of have to look at, so what does the FBI do? And then, yeah, I had to find something that kind of worked for that.

In book three, Storm Rising, we had done human trafficking, but wildlife trafficking is also a big deal. And it's very relevant in Hawaii because they are struggling so much with so many species that are just really teetering on the, on the edge of extinction.

If you look at the Hawaiian crow, the ʻAlalā Project, they've got, I think there's like 150 of them left and it got down to about 120. And they're building them back up. But they're also trying to introduce them back into the environment.

And they actually tried to introduce them back into the Pu'u Maka'ala area, but the Hawaiian hawks were just picking them off. I mean, this is just natural.

I mean, this is what would normally happen in their natural environment, but in this case, they're trying to keep these birds alive. So they've actually started reintroducing the birds into Maui instead of where the hawk isn't a danger.

So there's all of this that's going on in Hawaii with so many different bird breeds. And so it seemed like the right fit for this bird. Something very different from a lot of the crime that's been in the rest of the series.

Z: It makes for a captivating story. So you mentioned earlier that you have written some books with a co author who I'm very sorry to hear that she's no longer in this world. But can you tell us what was your writing process like of working with a co author? What is that like?

J: Yeah, well, and every writing partnership works very differently. Like some people do it where one person writes one chapter and one person writes another chapter and they just go through the book like that.

I always did all the drafting, but I actually met Ann when I was just writing for fun and posting things online. And we always had this sort of joke that I was the gun-control-loving Canadian and she was the gun-toting Texan. 

And she caught me in a gun error because I just didn't know enough about it. And so that started a dialogue between us and then we started kind of brainstorming together and then she would always edit my work. So she started off as like a beta reader, but then what she was doing was more than that.

So we really started becoming a real partnership. So we would do all of the story planning and the character sort of planning together. And then I would write the first draft and then she would edit it a chapter at a time as we were doing it. And then so she'd rip it apart and then we'd sort of build it back up together again. And then we would do it all over again at the end. 

That was a process that worked for us for a long time. I started writing the NYPD negotiators on my own a few years before she passed because not because we saw the cancer diagnosis coming, but she was 20 years older than I was and I assumed that at some point she was going to want to step back. And, you know, I'm being 20 years younger, would want to keep going.

So I kind of learned to write on my own before she passed on, so that when she did, That Others May Live was the very first K-9 book that I wrote on my own. And I was a little bit nervous about it because I was like, ooh, can I do this without her there to pick up any errors I might make about the dogs?

But bless her heart, she left me with basically all of her knowledge about the dogs, and so I was able to keep going.

I miss her. It's been getting easier with each book to write it on my own. But it was, that first book especially, was extremely weird just because I didn't have her to sort of bounce ideas off of when it came to the dogs.

This transcript has been lightly edited for content and style.

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