Akron Public Library

When the call comes in on the radio, Joe Pickett can hardly believe his ears: game wardens have found a hunter dead at a camp in the mountains, strung up, gutted, and flayed, as if he were the elk he'd been pursuing. A spent cartridge and an old poker chip lie next to his body. Suddenly, two previous suspicious hunting accidents are viewed in a new light.

"New York Times-bestselling writer C. J. Box returns with a thrilling new novel, featuring Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett. She was gone. Joe Pickett had good reason to dislike Dallas Cates, even if he was a rodeo champion, and now he has even more-Joe's eighteen-year-old ward, April, has run off with him. And then comes even worse news: The body of a girl has been found in a ditch along the highway-alive, but just barely, the victim of blunt force...

Joe Pickett is in his last week as the temporary game warden in the town of Baggs, Wyoming, but there have been strange things going on in the mountains, and his conscience won't let him leave without checking them out: reports of camps looted, tents slashed, elk butchered. And then there's the runner who simply vanished one day.

Joe Pickett is asked to look into a domestic terror group living in Wyoming's Red Desert, but Joe finds out they are not what they seem.