Saddlestring is a small town with a lot of big fish. One of those big fish, Opal Scarlett, has just been thrown in a river — or at least that’s what the sobbing drunk fisherman who threw her in the river claims. She’d been declaring that anyone using the river to transit her property had to pay a toll, state law be damned, and had recently strung up some wire to put that into effect, with ….ah, unfortunate neck consequences. Problem is with Opal Scarlett bein’ dead, that means there’s going to be a struggle for power between her two eldest sons, Arlen and Hank. (There’s also Wyatt, but in this redneck recreation of the splitting of the Carolingian Empire, he’s definitely the Lothar that no one but Carolingian historians remembers.) The Scarletts are major factors in the society of Saddlestring, and in the slow-brewing war for who inherits, every businessman and woman in town has to make their choice whose livery to wear: Arlen or Hank’s. Arlen is the prim and proper businessman whose charm belies the malice underneath, while Hank is….well, up front about being a mean cuss who will do what he wants to get what he wants. Joe Pickett is being sucked into this brewing Shakspearean drama by both the fact that his wife has a growing business that both brothers want to hire, and the fact that both brothers are trying to use state offices like the warden’s to wage lawfare against the other. Unfortunately, he also has a crazy man obsessed with vengeance who wants to ruin Joe, not merely kill him. Add to this equation a new boss who hates Joe and wants to make him miserable and the result is a compelling if infuriating story that results in the potential for a total sea change.

There’s a growing sense of entrapment in this book as Joe’s five years in the town begin to bear fruit that acts against him. A lot of the men who knew his character and worked with it even as they were up to skulduggery are now in prison, or dead; they’ve been replaced by bureaucrats who know nothing of the real world, only their statistics and pivot tables. These politicos and paper-pushers have no use and negative regard for a man who lives in the field and actually makes decisions for which he’s accountable like Joe, and as our game warden tries to figure out how to avoid getting his department trapped in a domestic business war and defend his family against a stalker who does crazy thing like leaving elk heads outside his home or firing into the windows, he finds that his superiors in the agency are just as hateful of him as whomever is terrorizing his family. We start seeing that other Joe, then, the man who despite his shooting deficiencies and tendencies to get beat up by thus, burns with vengeance for justice and can get real western real quick. Joe is aware of this tendency in himself and tries to guard against it, but when his family is threatened the gentle warden turns angry cowboy, not even trying to guard his tongue when talking to his new ‘boss’, who is just as hatable as the bureaucrat in Winterkill despite the fact that his only power lies in the state he bends the knee to: the actual man could be beaten up by an angry middle-schooler. At least the Winterkill villain had charisma and malignant energy, this cretin is more like Garanin in Chernobyl: a revolting weasel whose only power is the state’s. Picture Dolores Umbridge with a pocket protector and a calculator.

As with the previous book, I’m ranging far and wide away from the book’s happenings because I don’t want to give away the plot. Suffice to say there are direct connections to the first two books, as the stalker blames Joe for the death of his brother and a young child: he’s not a sociopath, since he definitely feels emotions and such, but he’s definitely off his rocker and calculating enough to be scary. The climax happens with a terrific drought-ending gully-washer that poses a challenge for Joe and the other law enforcers, and creates several scenes that add to the creepifying and scary experience. Definitely looking forward to continuing! (Though, I do need to incorporate some nonfiction because it’s Opening Day and it’s the middle of the month and I haven’t read anything for the Science Survey…….)

Happy to report that I read most of this book and the one previous in a manner befitting the books: outside, by sunlight and nary a screen involved.