Joe Pickett, Game Warden, is not a fan of his mother-in-law, but he wouldn’t figure her for murder. One morning while making his rounds and checking herds, he notices something odd about the wind turbines being installed on the far ridges of Mommy Dearest’s property: one of them has a body attached to it, that of her latest husband. Missy is soon clapped in irons by the swaggering Sheriff McClanahan, but there’s something odd and improbable about all this. So, Joe takes off his Game Warden hat and puts on his private investigator hat and goes to work. At the same time, Nate Romanowski, the wild man with a secret commando past, thinks he is being hunted by some of his former colleagues, especially after a personal tragedy befalls him and he begins looking for blood. These two cases, intriguingly, aren’t as separate as they seem. Cold Wind is a fun Pickett mystery-thriller, though largely removed from outdoors action.

Missy, the mother-in-law, has been a thorn in Joe’s side for the entire series: she is an ambitious human predator, always sizing up men to see if it’s possible for her to dump her current husband and marry into a better clas, and through her social and business machinations she’s made herself the queen of quite the little empire — even calling herself Duchess Alden from time to time. Even before she was a land magnate, she looked down imperiously on Joe, declaring that her brilliant daughter deserved more than marriage to a ‘park ranger’. Whatever their differences, though, Joe has no interest in seeing his girls’ grandmother imprisoned, especially after his initial investigation indicates that Earl Alden, the deceased, was up to all kinds of speculation and fraud that might’ve made him the target of hundreds of people. Along the way readers are treated to a discussion of wind turbine politics and economics in Box’s customary from-both-sides fashion. The ending was unusual and a bit of a surprise, but compelling all the same.

I’ve already started the next book, where it looks like the Romanowski thread from this book will loom front and center.