Goodreads asked Jan S. Gephardt:

Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?

Jan S. Gephardt Lots of places. Recent behavioral and intelligence research on dogs was one strong inspiration. And yes, a certain amount of wish-fulfillment: what dog owner hasn't occasionally wished their dog could tell them what it so obviously wanted them to know?
I've long been a science fiction fan, but I'm also a dedicated mystery-lover. I'd been thinking for a long time about blending the two, and one day I was watching a TV show about a real-life police investigation that used a bloodhound to track a suspect from the scene of a murder to his own house. "It's too bad we can't swear in the dog!" the officer said. And I thought, "What if you could?"
Another origin was my research into the effects of microgravity on the human body, and questioning some of the standard tropes of sf from the 1950s and '60s that haven't been seriously questioned since--in spite of a multitude of discoveries since then, and research aided by, among others, the Kelly astronaut twins. If "Mars ain't the kind of place to raise your kids," then where would be a good place to rear healthy future generations of spacefaring humans? My partial answer is Rana Station.
"What's Bred in the Bone" and the rest of the "Bones" Trilogy has roots in the classic science fiction of earlier generations, informed by some of the latest research I could access.

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