By Hallie Ephron

The new year gets off to an auspicious start with C. J. Box's "Blue Heaven," a thriller set in ranch-country northern Idaho, where retired Los Angeles Police Department officers have found retirement nirvana. They live lavishly, isolated from their neighbors, hoping their pasts won't catch up with them.

The book opens with a pair of smart, scrappy kids - 12-year-old Annie Taylor and her brother, 10-year-old William - tracing Sand Creek, "angry and swollen with runoff," looking for a place to fish. They witness an execution-style killing. Before they can hide, the killers see them. The children race for safety while the villains try to catch them before they can talk about what they've seen. Meanwhile, retired LAPD Detective Eduardo Villatoro arrives in town, following up a lead and determined to crack a robbery-and-murder case whose solution has eluded him for more than a decade.

The ranch setting, combined with a rich, complex story, gives the novel the flavor of a Western saga. Cliffhanger scene shifts, a ticking clock, and escalating danger lend it all the trappings of a suspense novel, but with characters that make the reader care. The children's lonely mother, Monica, is a heartbreaker with a disastrous weakness for the wrong men. Crusty, struggling, solitary Jess Rawlins, with whom Annie and William find refuge, feels like a rancher version of Shane. The villains are served up with delicious nastiness, from town gossip Fiona Pritzle, who snoops through the mail before she delivers it, to a quartet of ruthless, retired police-detective bully boys.

Against a backdrop of wilderness, rich with the scent of pine and cattle, there are strong elements of classic tragedy here as well, as yearning propels all of the characters, good and bad, into mortal peril. "Blue Heaven" is my favorite kind of thriller - one with a heart.