Joe Pickett’s in his last week as the temporary game warden in the isolated town of Baggs, Wyoming, but there have been strange things going on in the surrounding 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’s gone missing – an Olympic hopeful who’d been training in the region and then just…vanished. Joe doesn’t mind admitting that the farther he rides, the more he wishes he could just turn around and go home. 

And he is right to be concerned. Because what awaits him is like nothing he’s ever dealt with, like something out of an old story, except this is all too real and all too deadly. 

When he’d first saddled up, he’d thought of this as his last patrol. What he hadn’t known was just how accurate that might turn out to be.

Charles James Box is an American writer, a native of Wyoming, who lives outside of Cheyenne with his wife Laurie, and daughters, Molly, Becky and Roxanne.. His Joe Pickett Series has ten novels. The first in this series, Open Season, was included in the New York Times list of "Notable Books" of 2001. He also has written two stand-alone novels, the first of which, Blue Heaven, won an Edgar Award for Best Mystery Novel of 2008.