"...superb mystery series..."

Box makes it a resounding three for three with this worthy successor to last year’s celebrated Savage Run, which followed his acclaimed debut, Open Season (2001). The story opens with another galvanizing set piece — a Box specialty — as Joe Pickett, game warden of Wyoming’s Twelve Sleep County, is caught in a mountain blizzard with a dead body beside him in his pick-up truck. The body belongs to a federal bureaucrat, much hated by the locals, who may have been killed by a group of survivalists who call themselves the Sovereigns. Pickett isn’t sure he buys the connection, but when a couple of bloodthirsty FBI agents arrive in town determined to use the incident as
an excuse to attack the Sovereigns, a' la Waco, Joe knows he’s landed in an all-too-familiar position — caught in the middle between two sets of bad guys, one of whom works for the government. Matters turn personal when Joe’s foster daughter is kidnapped by her troubled mother, now living in the Sovereign camp. Box handles this controversial material superbly, showing vividly how government rigidity causes human tragedy in the name of patriotism. Pickett remains an utterly sympathetic, Gary Cooperish hero, but as the series develops, he has begun to darken noticeably. Box’s version of Mr. Smith lives in Wyoming, but
Washington keeps coming to him, clear-cutting individual human lives with its ever more virulent strain of bureaucracy. Pickett is our voice for decency in the wilderness, but he’s getting steadily angrier.

A superb mystery series with an urgent message for troubled times. —Bill Ott