The Iron Dog — Peter M. Wright

The Iron Dog case follows the abduction and assault of a seventeen-year-old highschool girl and the hunt for the suspects by Barton Keene, a former San Francisco homicide detective, and his two close friends, Buddy Bigfeather, a grape grower in the California wine country, and Denton Tuggle, a local cop. Keene's pursuit of the outlaw gang that kidnapped Tonya Charbonneau eventually includes murders, crime scene investigations, airplane crashes, and autopsies. The search ends in a final confrontation between the suspects, Barton Keene and his two companions. Keene resides in a somewhat rundown mountaintop villa called Casa Viejo with a nomadic old tomcat he has dubbed Crazy Christian. He won't admit it, but he is deeply in love with Marianna Dowd, a local six-grade schoolteacher.