Game Warden Joe Pickett’s peaceful fishing trip with his daughters is interrupted by a foul odor in the air — and following the scent, as the game warden must, leads him to an astonishing sight: the massive corpse of a bull moose that has been surgically mutilated, yet strangely left alone by scavengers. Days later, Joe hears reports over police radio that a group of cattle has been found mutilated in a very similar way, and goes to investigate despite the agitation and outright hostility of the sheriff — who regards Joe as a useless bumpkin despite the fact that our gentle warden has upstaged the good ol’ boy several times in this series. The creepy air around these sites of dead animals, with missing parts and skinned faces, grows menacing when two men are found in the same state. The rumors range all over the place, from aliens to cultists — but Joe, acutely disinterested in anything woo-woo, keeps ranging and digging, looking for the truth down more mundane avenues. This is an interesting entry in the series because of the supernatural atmosphere — not only the strange animal behavior around killsites, but a level of mysticism around two characters. This is the most unusual book in the series to date, as it’s more of a ‘traditional’ thriller than the more morally complex stories from early books: the baddie is most definitely the baddie, whatever it is: grizzly, demonic spirits, aliens, an extreme bovidaphobe. Joe appears to be growing as a character — more confident, based on his prior successes, even if he’s still a poor shot. His relationships with those around them are growing, too: although he has enemies like the sheriff, there are many in th community who recognize the warden as good people, and he has a genuine friend and ally in an….odd character who proves useful in unpredictable ways. That character has a strong presence here, and proves to be something of a mystic in regards to Nature. I liked how Box was able to keep characters and the reader moving through a fog until the back third, when some pieces fit together and then actions transpired to open even more cloudbreaks. Gripping, if weird.