WARNING: This review contains a prominent spoiler for Three Inch Teeth and Shadows Reel. Proceed with caution, pilgrim. 

Joe Pickett and Nate Romanowski are both wounded men,  having come close to losing all that was dearest to them at the hands of a sociopath, Dallas Cates, who in prison teamed up with a former covert operator for DC who has now turned his skills and cruelty against the government itself.   Nate in particular has lost his wife and business partner, Liv, and abandoned his daughter Kestrel to the Picketts’ care so he can regain his ferality and wreck revenge on Dallas’ partner in evil, Axel Soledad. Nate and Geronimo thought they’d killed him in an alley fight, but evidently not: he’s still alive if not kicking, and actively planning on wiping out a large contingent of government officials and military-industrial leaders who are gathering for an annual “let’s pretend to be cowboys” conference in remote northern Wyoming.    Joe has just been asked by the governor to go looking for a missing outfitter in those very parts, a man whose assistant happens to be the governor’s son-in-law – and whose  disappearance the governor would prefer to keep under his hat for the moment.  Joe and Nate’s paths will undoubtedly converge on Battle Mountain, but trouble is also waiting for them at home – and Sheridan will get her chance to shine. 

I approached Battle Mountain with a little wariness,  in part because Axel Soledad is a troublesome antagonist, sometimes very hatably effective and sometimes overused, especially the way he reliably gins up mooks from the ranks of college kids who like larping as activist and want to take down the system, man.  I realize college kids can be naive even in their cynicism, but given how many allies Soledad betrays or abandons at some point you’d think some word of mouth would start hampering his recruiting ability.   (There’s also the fact, of course, that now I have to wait an entire year for another Joe story after my two-month drive through two and a half decades of them.)   Adding enormously to the tension is the fact that Soledad’s greater organization has a lot of shadow operators, including the sheriff  in Saddlestring who threatens Mary-Beth and Kestrel. There’s also a possibly rogue FBI agent roaming around, one who claims to be on Joe and Nate’s side – but neither would trust a goonie boy any further than Kestrel could throw them. (If Nate were to throw a goonie boy, I’m pretty sure it would be off the side of a cliff and the goon in question would go pretty far.) This was almost all straight action, and had a great climax.