This book is one in a long line--about 20 now-- of Box's character Joe Pickett who is a Wyoming game warden. In this book he tangles, as in really tangles, with a local family. Pickett's daughter who had run away with a rodeo bull rider is found battered and comatose at the side of a road. It's iffy if she'll survive.

Pickett starts looking for the perpetrator and his initial suspect is the bull rider who is laid up from riding injuries, apparently, so he drops off the radar, kind of.

There are several other subplots. It doesn't look like some federal officers in the book will be on a Christmas card list.

Suspicion goes elsewhere and there is a a whole mess of family members who are ready to kill for their benefit. A good read for a couple of hours of time.


Box lives somewhere around Cheyenne.