** spoiler alert **
The third Joe Pickett murder mystery continues much where Savage Run left off.

For me this was a two and a half star book. I've upped it to three stars in recognition of the author's continued ability to accelerate a story through its second half.

Summary - it gets cold in the Rockies, very cold. The only half-decent lawman in Twelve Sleep County remains game warden Joe Pickett but sadly his family can't survive two books without child-related adversity. Various new people drop in to either add more incompetence to the already irritating local law enforcers or a little unnecessary military support for our otherwise 'lone ranger'...

My issues with it were several - probably just personal preference related - but several none the same...
- the story felt stretched with many repetitive segments that smacked of padding.
- the book is quite depressing; even the normally humanitarian Joe and his family are plunged into a bitter back story which often - too often - rises in front of the main plot and which ends badly.
- the ending looks bolted on, feels like an afterthought and singularly fails to brighten the long crafted gloom.
- the kindle version has lots of typos - some as serious as mixed speech in single paragraphs, missing carriage returns and capitalised spelling mistakes - it's almost as if the editorial team weren't paying much attention...

You can hopefully tell that I'm disappointed. C.J.Box has proved to me that he's a great writer and I wonder if it's because the first two books were so good that maybe my expectation levels were preset a notch too highly...?

Conclusion: Sorry but for me this is not Joe's finest hour...