Terrier

Terrier is a fantasy novel by the American writer Tamora Pierce, published in 2006 by Random House Books for Young Readers, and the first book of the Beka Cooper trilogy.

Its heroine is Beka Cooper, a sixteen-year-old probationer in the Provost's Guard of the city of Tortall, newly assigned to the Lower City and its difficult beat. Beka carries a gift she did not ask for: she can hear the voices of the dead when they settle on the wings of the pigeons, and the birds tell her about the murderers she is trying to find. The Guard's attention is fixed on the fire opal killer, so the Shadow Snake, who is taking the district's children, becomes hers to hunt. Tortall is a city of guilds and patrols held together by a code of conduct that Beka's fellow Guards call the training, and she has to use it and cover from her two trainers to keep her investigation alive.

Pierce is a prolific writer of young adult fantasy, and this series steps back two hundred years before the Alanna books to follow Beka's own career in the same fictional country.