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JUNE 06, 2026 Call Dropped: A Cozy Mystery (Cryptid Dispatcher Book 1) By Fern Lockwood

She hears what everyone else misses. She just wishes it didn't keep leading to bodies.

Wren Gallagher took the night-shift dispatcher job in tiny Havenfall, Oregon, for the quiet. Eighteen months later, she's very good at it — and also at noticing things that don't add up. Like the four-second 911 call from a geology professor on Sorrow Ridge that her supervisor ruled "accidental fall" before she'd finished transcribing it.

Dr. Theo Brennan called in scared. Not bear-scared. The other kind.

Wren isn't a detective. She's a dispatcher. She reads voices for a living, files what she hears, and hands off to the people with badges. She knows her job. She's very committed to her job.

She's also the only person in Havenfall who thinks the geology professor didn't slip.

So she starts doing what dispatchers do: logging, cross-referencing, asking the right person the right question at the right time. She talks to the town archivist who knows where the old land surveys went. The diner owner who remembers every truck she's ever seen on Route 47. The county deputy who is running a parallel investigation and is increasingly annoyed about her parallel investigation. And Ruth Becker — the trail guide who has filed encounter reports about Sorrow Ridge for years, every single one quietly reclassified and filed away.

Because here's the thing about Havenfall: the ridge has a history. A 1987 wildfire with an unexplained origin. A state protocol that nobody talks about. And a sound in the old growth — below the range of human hearing, but not below the range of Wren's — that isn't a bear, isn't a person, and isn't leaving.

Wren isn't investigating a cryptid. She's investigating a murder. But the ridge doesn't care about the distinction.

Call Dropped is the first book in The Cryptid Dispatcher — a cozy mystery series set in the fog-threaded forests of small-town Oregon, where 911 dispatchers hear everything, small towns remember everything, and something very old is paying attention.

Perfect for fans of: paranormal cozies with grounded protagonists, Pacific Northwest settings, and mysteries where the humor is bone-dry and the stakes are very real.
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