Who watches the watchers? Or in this case, who investigates private investigators? Cassie Dewell is intrigued by an odd phone call she gets: a wealthy Florida patron had hired a P.I. to investigate a man who swindled her out of money, but said P.I. mysteriously disappeared shortly after reporting that he was on the way to Anaconda, Montana, and that he expected results soon. (Montana also evidently has towns called Wisdom, Harmony, and Manhattan. Still no patch on New Mexico’s Truth or Consequences, though.) She gets this request while she’s working on another odd job: the creator of a nationwide treasure hunt, who left clues to a fortune in gold hidden somewhere in the wilderness, wants Cassie to see if she can suss out who he is. He doesn’t want people figuring out where the gold might be because they know the author; he wants them to find it the honest way, by deciphering the clues and riddles within the poem he used to kick off the treasure hunt. With this odd combination of cases, Cassie enlists some help in the form of a rough-and-ready young woman named April Pickett. Treasure State is far and away my favorite of the Dewell books so far, combing as it does a real-life treasure hunt and Montana’s fascinating history.

The main thrust of Treasure State is the missing P.I. and his search subject, “Marc Daly”. both Cassie and her missing predecessor realized that Daly was not a one-off, but rather a serial offender. He approached single, wealthy women while assuming various personalities, charmed them completely, then vanished after they wired him money for whatever project his personality had in mind — a movie deal, a new “killer app”. As the plot develops, we realized that the missing PI had gotten quite close indeed to the truth — but there is, as ever, a twist. The treasure hunt aspect is more of a B-plot, but brings in a minor character from Badlands, who here doesn’t get viewpoint chapters but is still heroic in his way. Speaking of bringing in characters: I was quite pleased to see April Pickett, though I much prefer her older sisters Sheridan and Lucy. Still, April’s abhorrent appraisal of men continues in good fashion. (She is responsible for introducing Dallas Cates, a character so hateable I still remember his name a year later: he is the Obadiah Hakeswill of the Pickettverse.) Dewell has definitely grown from her first appearance in The Highway: no longer a Dudley Doright, she’s accustomed to fibbing a bit (or “applying social engineering”, if you’d like) to get information she needs, and she’s much better at thinking outside the box in general. I think her prolonged struggle to find and nail the execrable Lizard King has definitely summoned up the blood and stiffened a few sinews within her. The action execution of the novel was wonderful in itself — I zipped through this in barely a day — but Box added a lot of appeal through his version of the real-life Fenn Treasure Hunt, and his foray into Anaconda’s history within America’s mining & labor movement. I also love how seriously place incorporates into Box’s writing; a lot of the restaurants he mentions really exists, and the competition between Butte (where the bosses lived) and Anaconda (where the workers lived and were poisoned by their work) is visceral.

Treasure State was a great read for me; I’m looking forward to ‘continuing’ in this series by reading the prequel (Back of Beyond) and the book where she finally finds and makes extinct her personal ‘terrible lizard king’.

Quotes

“My history with state troopers isn’t very good,” she said.
“Just don’t shoot him.”