Cassie Dewell is the new girl on the block, having just been hired as a senior investigator away from her former position in Montana.  But that’s OK: that last position ended with her winning a shootout against corrupt cops, one of whom had been her partner.  She could do with a fresh start in a new town, a place where the future is warm and bright and cl – ahh, crap. She’s been hired to work on a case independently of her new coworkers ….in North Dakota….in the winter.  Can’t win `em all, I guess.  Badlands  takes us to a town that’s transformed from a dwindling backwater to a modern boomtown overnight, courtesy of  the Bakken oil fields,  and shows how quickly serious crime is taking root in the town as well.  Box tells this story not simply through the detective who has to figure out who the rotter is on her team (hint: he’s the one who keeps glaring at her), but through a little boy who stumbles upon something dangerous on his paper route and unwittingly exposes himself and his mother to gangland warfare.    While I doubt I’ll take to Dewell as readily as I did Pickett, this was still a compelling story that, in true Box fashion, uses the landscape and weather to shape the story, and uses then-contemporary events like the oil boom and the rise of cartel warfare in the US of A to thrill the reader.  Giving us a kid character who has fetal alcohol syndrome and struggles to make himself understood by adults was an interesting touch, I thought, especially as the reader knows exactly what he’s meant to be saying and the misunderstanding  — to us and the kid – appears to be solely on the adult’s part.  It’s a sad look into how parents’ behavior can diminish their children’s lives, and as this story goes, it gets sadder.