When a prominent University of Wyoming professor goes missing, authorities are stumped. That is, until Joe Pickett makes two surprising discoveries while hunting down a wounded elk on his district as an epic spring storm descends upon him. First, he finds the professor's vehicle parked on a remote mountainside. Then Joe finds the professor's frozen and mutilated body. When he attempts to learn more, his investigation is obstructed by federal agents,...

Joe Pickett's 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.

It's an hour away from darkness, a bitter winter storm is raging, and Joe Pickett is deep in the forest edging Battle Mountain, shotgun in his left hand, his truck's detached steering wheel handcuffed to his right and Lamar Garniner's arrow-riddled corpse splayed against the tree in front of him. Lamar's murder and the sudden onslaught of the snowstorm warn: Get off the mountain. But Joe knows this episode is far from over. Somewhere in the dense...

Ranch owner Opal Scarlett has vanished under suspicious circumstances, and her sons Hank and Arlen are battling it out for control of her multi-million-dollar empire. Everyone in town is so caught up in the brothers' battle that, with the exception of game warden Joe Pickett, they seem to have forgotten that Opal is still missing. Joe begins his investigation and is beaten nearly to death by Hank Scarlett's right-hand man a stranger who looks eerily...

"Joe Pickett's been hired to investigate one of the most cold-blooded mass killings in Wyoming history. Attorney Clay McCann admitted to slaughtering four campers in a backcountry corner of Yellowstone National Park, a 'free-fire' zone with no residents or government regulation. In this remote fifty-square-mile stretch a man can literally get away with murder. Now McCann's a free man, and Pickett's about to discover his motive--one buried in Yellowstone's...

Joe Pickett investigates the disappearance of a local businessman, who recently had his intended retirement property declared wetlands and is suspected in the murder of two EPA employees.

In the wake of an elk hunter's grisly murder, Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett is directed by the governor to investigate the relevance of a mysterious poker chip found at the crime scene.

"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 daughter, 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 trauma. It is April, and the doctors don't know if she'll recover. Cates denies having anything to do with it--says...

"A day before the three Pickett girls come home for Thanksgiving, Joe is called out for a moose poaching incident that turns out to be something much more sinister: a local fishing guide has been brutally tortured and murdered. At the same time, Marybeth opens an unmarked package at the library where she works and finds a photo album that belonged to an infamous Nazi official. Who left it there? And why? She learns that during World War II, several...

Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett's teenage daughter, Sheridan, receives a text message with a staggering implication: that April, the foster daughter thought to have died 6 years ago in a massacre, is still alive. If it really is April who's texting, she's in danger, and for Pickett, the only thing worse than losing her the first time would be losing her again. Pickett must negotiate FBI politics, recruit his fugitive friend Nate Romanowski, and...