Game Warden Joe Pickett has just discovered a massacre. Someone has slaughtered over twenty sage grouse – nearly an entire breeding group – and left their bodies to rot, shooting them just for malevolent thrills.  Joe goes to work processing the scene, but then receives a phone call bringing much worse news: the sheriff is enroute to the hospital in Billings with the body of a young woman who was found beaten very near to death, then dumped on the side of the highway.  The sheriff is calling because the girl could very well be Joe’s adopted daughter April, who ran off with a rodeo star named Dallas Cates  at the end of the last book –  a man who the sheriff and warden both suspect of being involved in an assault when he was in high school.   The Cates family is all kinds of trouble, Joe is warned, especially that mother of theirs.   Things get worse, though:  as Joe and the sheriff try to get to the bottom of who might have just rendered his girl brain-dead,   Mary Beth calls from the hospital and reports that she just saw Nate Romanowski being wheeled in: hed been shot three times at close range with a shotgun and wasn’t expected to make it.  From such pain and confuse comes more of the more intense Pickett novels, one with a surprising ending that makes me eager to get to Vicious Circle, which appears to follow off events here while not being a direct sequel. 

There is a lot going on in this novel, and unlike Stone Cold there’s no comparative fluff like the “Sheridan is scared of her classmate” line.  Joe’s actual game warden job is part of the story, of course, but his investigation into the Sage Grouse Massacree actually touches on the April drama,   since the Cates’ property is adjacent and when he goes down in his official capacity as garden warden to ask Dallas’ crazy family if they saw anything suspicious, he gets a lead that proves useful – and  sees some possible truth to Dallas’ claim that he was in no state to beat up an eighteen-year-old because he himself had been injured while bull-riding.  As it turns out, people were right to warn Joe about Mama Cates: the whole family is crazy as they are mean,  and none meaner or weirder than her.  There’s another plot I won’t go into because of spoilers, but there’s someone on the ranch whose viewpoint we slide in to from time to time who give us a closer view as to how messed up the Cates’ are. 

This was an excellent entry in the Pickett books, with three plots that weave in together, a lot of emotional intensity and action,   and the running joke of Joe being hard on state trucks continues.