She is a red heeler / border collie mix with pale blue eyes and no patience for anyone who is slower than she is, and she runs the house. Her friends are Jet, Brandi and Punkin — a Newfoundland who is enormous, unhurried and completely unbothered by anything; a boxer who takes everything far too seriously and runs through everything; and a basset hound who follows a scent for a mile and would trade the whole case for a sandwich.

Every morning, she wakes the others with the exact right amount of nudge and no-nonsense bark. Jet blinks awake, shakes himself like a wet towel, and lumbers down the hall at his own thoughtful pace. Brandi springs up, muscles tight and ready to tackle the day — and anything that might be hiding under the couch. Punkin lifts a sleepy nose, already tracking yesterday’s crumbs across the kitchen floor.

When trouble comes — a missing slipper, a suspicious crinkle in the garden, the case of the vanishing picnic sandwiches — she takes charge. She maps the scene with fast, precise circles, orders Brandi to “check the perimeter,” tells Jet to block the back gate with his great, calm bulk, and sends Punkin on a single-minded scent sweep with a firm promise of a sandwich if he sticks to the trail.

Her leadership isn’t loud. It’s a quick tilt of the head, a clipped bark, the way she stakes a paw on the clue and refuses to let it be ignored. Brandi’s energy supplies the momentum; Punkin’s nose supplies the stubborn detail; Jet’s steady patience keeps the plan from collapsing when things go wrong. Together they cover what she cannot, each doing what they do best.

She tolerates the delays and the detours because she knows they belong to the team. And when the case is closed — slipper found, crinkle explained, sandwiches recovered (with Punkin getting precisely one bite) — she softens. The pale blue eyes that ruled the house relax into something like pride as the four of them curl up: Jet taking up most of the couch, Brandi tucked in by the door, Punkin snoring contentedly with crumbs on his whiskers, and she, finally, allowing herself to be bossed into a nap by the steady, slow rhythm of the pack.

One day I noticed that between the four of them they had four completely different jobs, and that they could solve almost anything together — and the series was born from that. Every case in these books is built the same way: one friend finds the trail, one gets the team in, one handles whatever goes wrong, and Skadi works out what it all means.

I wrote these for children aged five to nine, and for the grown-ups reading them aloud. All six are set in places she has been — Spring, Dallas, the mountains of northern New Mexico, San Antonio, and new adventures not yet undertaken — because a story is better when the ground under it is real.