"...continues his run of excellence in Trophy Hunt..."

"I want to get inside his head, see what makes him tick. Find out what he's thinking and why he came here. And who sent him."

So says Nate Romanowski, one-time CIA operative and current Wyoming raptor expert. In the midst of inexplicable murders and mutilations in the Bighorn Mountains of northern Wyoming, he's trying to help friend Joe Pickett, fish and game warden, crime-solver and all-around good guy. But Romanowski's not talking about getting inside the head of a suspect, at least not a human suspect. He wants to get personal with a grizzly bear.

When Pickett comes across a dead moose while fishing with his girls, nothing about the carcass is quite right. Parts of the body have been removed with surgical precision, and the choice meat remaining has been ignored by the critters that would usually feast on it. And there's a strange and scary pressure in the air, an odd silence at the site.

The next victims to turn up are cattle on a nearby ranch, and then two men are killed. Land prices in the area - primed to soar in a new energy boom for the area's abundant coal-bed methane - are sagging with the weird events, and kids are going to school with aluminum foil on their hats.

Box, who has quickly become one of the writers whose books I look forward to every year, continues his run of excellence in Trophy Hunt. The book has done for cattle mutilations and crop circles what the latest incarnation of The Stepford Wives has done for robotic wives and uptight suburbs - made the '70s fresh again.Jane Dickinson