Dimensions
153 x 234 x 26mm
'John Steinbeck once said Montana is a love affair. If a person was going to make his troth with any particular place on earth, I don't think he could find a better one than the stretch of road I was now on. Every bridge crossed a postcard stream, every mountain tumbled into one higher and a deeper green than itself.'
But in the Bitterroot Valley of western Montana, the love affair has a chilling, violent side, as ex-Texas Ranger, now lawyer, Billy Bob Holland soon discovers when he goes for a few weeks fishing with his friend from Vietnam days, Doc Voss.
Doc's daughter Maisey is brutally gang-raped and beaten by bikers and ring leader Lamar Ellison walks free when the DNA samples "get lost". Billy Bob wonders whose side the sheriff is on? Soon after Ellison is burned alive and Doc is arrested. So much for Billy Bob's vacation - Doc needs a lawyer, and fast. Not only that: newly released killer Wyatt Dixon has tracked Billy Bob to Montana, bent on avenging the death of his sister for which he holds Billy Bob responsible.
The grotesque Wyatt is only one thread of a tangled web of evil that includes neo-Nazi militias, gold miners who tip cyanide into the rivers, a paedophile ring and the Mob. As the corpses of the guilty and innocent pile up, and still haunted by his dead friend LQ Navarro, Billy Bob stands almost alone, determined that the centre will hold, no matter what evil threatens it.
In this follow-up to 'Heartwood' and the Edgar Award-winning 'Cimarron Rose', America's finest crime writer sets the breathtaking Montana landscape in direct counterpoint to the savage darkness that exists there.
