Box includes a quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson before his story begins: "Men are what their mothers made them." That's certainly true here in the case of the Cates family in which the matriarch shapes her three sons to believe that family trumps everything and everyone.
Joe Pickett's adopted daughter April has run off with the youngest Cates son, Dallas, a rodeo star. Now she's found along a road badly beaten and with severe brain trauma, while Dallas lies with broken ribs in his Wyoming home, the result, he says, of a rodeo injury.
Pickett, a game warden and the hero in this series of novels, is ready to believe the worst about Dallas Cates, but the evidence suggests the young man may be telling the truth, more or less. When another man is found with some of April's possessions, that seems to establish Dallas's innocence.
Yet there are other mysteries that prevent Pickett from forgetting about Brenda Cates, her mindless husband and those three loyal sons. Nate Romanowski, Pickett's friend with a shady past, is ambushed with shotgun blasts in a barn, and his girlfriend disappears. A flock of rare sage grouse is massacred. One of Brenda's sons, Timber, is released from prison with a mission from Mom.
All this is going on while April lies in a Montana hospital in an induced coma, while a blizzard threatens.
This is exciting stuff, and Box weaves it altogether into a satisfying and totally believable whole.
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