There’s something rotten in the state of Wyoming – and specifically, the county of Medicine Wheel, in the northern reaches of the state.  Seems in the last few years some financial grandee retired there and has been buying up everything, and there are rumors that he may be behind a murder-for-hire operation that’s been knocking off high-profile business and tech kingpins guilty of various moral outrages, but shielded from them by virtue of the crimes being white-collar  – or more directly, by their money.  The governor wants his Special Agent Game Warden Joe Pickett to mosey on up and do a little sniffing around – unofficially, of course.   Officially he’s delivering a load of turkeys to help repopulate the area, and then assist the game warden there in a few other game warden matters. When Joe arrives, though, his reputation has preceded him: the resident game warden gives him the stink eye and asks what the governor has got him up here doing.  So much for Secret Agent Game Wardening.    Of the Pickett books I’ve read to date, this is arguably the one with the most far-fetched premise, but   Box pulls off a fun thriller regardless.

When the governor mentioned Medicine Wheel, Joe was not happy:  Medicine Wheel county is even more remote and unattractive than the county he was hidden away in after punching a small-town cop to expedite the governor’s business back in Below Zero.  The entire county has in recent years subsisted on government benefits – disability payments, etc, plus a little under the table action from helping tourists find and shoot elk. In the last five years, though, some mysterious stranger has come into town and put people to work –  and they’ll very grateful to Mr. “Wolfgang Templeton”.  So grateful, in fact, that if some outsider starts asking questions about him, even the innocent kind an ordinary tourist might ask,  they’ll find themselves being encouraged to leave. The last man the governor sent up here died in a mysterious cabin fire, and the black remains are still standing when Joe checks in. It doesn’t take him long to realize that pretty much everyone in this county is deeply corrupt, so much so that they don’t even pretend to take Joe’s legitimate game-warden concerns seriously: one of Templeton’s men  is pulling out large fish way over the limit, and both the judge and the resident game warden treat Joe with contempt for suggesting they enforce the laws of the land.    There’s a least one independent-minded woman in the county Joe can coax information out of, though, and Joe uses his realization that his cabin is bugged to begin  manipulating the malfactors as he starts learning whats going on.  At the same time, he’s startled to realize that his friend  Nate Romanowski, the wilderness man with his own moral code, is evidently in the pay of Templeton –  and Templeton’s home has an even more shocking guest. 

Although the premise of this was rather wild, and there’s a Sheridan subplot that just seems like filler,   I enjoyed seeing Joe on his own, pitted against multiple cretins and using his own creativity and wit to evade and overcome them, and his own humanity gets to shine further when he confronts one man who has morally compromised himself to assist his daughter, who has had severe medical issues growing up.  There’s also some comic relief when Nate is forced to attend a dinner party and wear formal clothing: it’s a bit like Belle trying to civilize the Beast, and  yes, there is a Belle present.