Three novels after "Open Season," perhaps the best first novel I ever read, C.J. Box adds this adventure in the ofttimes crime-ridden life of game warden Joe Pickett. One of the unique attributes of these stories is the setting, where mysteries aren't thought to happen much. But to Pickett, his wife Marybeth and daughters Sheridan and 7-year old Lucy living in Saddlestring, Wyoming, they do -- if Box has anything to do with it. Forget about the quiet, regular life of a game warden, especially when he seems to be the smartest investigator in the area.

In a moment of country calm on an early-September day, Pickett takes advantage of it by taking his girls fly-fishing up Crazy Woman Creek. But the calm is disturbed when they stumble across an ill behaved fisherman followed by a strange odor in the air. Tracking the nauseous scent he discovers the mutilated corpse of a Moose. It wasn't just killed. Half the animal's face has been surgically sliced away, the skin peeled back. When a small herd of cattle is discovered with similar patterns of death, Joe and local law enforcement know that something terrifying is going on.

A task force is formed, Joe included. Sheriff Barnum doesn't like the game warden getting into his jurisdiction and makes his feelings loudly known, but when two men are found dead with the same surgically precise wounds, all bets and any thought of a turf war are off.

Box pulls off another revealing mind game in which his very straight and astute character uses all his skill and intelligence to uncover a plot that has elements of mysticism thrown into a landscape of death and greed amid rugged beauty. And he can describe the sagebrush and terrain of the Bighorns like few others.