((2011) Joe & his mother-in-law Missy square off and are on the same side at the same time as she is accused of murdering her latest husband then hanging him from an arm of a wind turbine. Her former husband Bud confesses on the witness stand at the end that he and he alone killed the man. Joe learns at the end that in fact Missy was in fact behind the murder but uses it as leverage to finally get control of her. Very good.KIRKUS REVIEWWyoming Fish and Game Warden Joe Pickett's fondest dream becomes his worst nightmare when his loathsome mother-in-law is arrested for murder.Earl Alden, the sixth suitor to take Missy Vankueren Longbrake Alden to the nuptial bed, was proud of the 100 new wind turbines sprouting on his spread, the Thunderbird Ranch. But someone must have disliked both them and him, because Joe finds his corpse chained to the vane of one of them, rotating briskly. Joe's current nemesis, county sheriff Kyle McLanahan, and rookie county attorney Lisa Rich, announce that they've got an airtight case against Missy based on the testimony of an unnamed informant who maintains that she engaged him to kill the Earl of Lexington, who in a reversal of the customary order of things had been preparing to divorce her before she could tire of him. Joe, whose dislike of his overbearing, manipulative mother-in-law crystallized into something harder when she divorced rancher Bud Longbrake, confiscated his family's property and left him empty-handed, finds himself in the unwelcome position of hunting for exculpatory evidence. He'd love to have the help of outlaw falconer Nate Romanowski once more. But Nate, following a serious quarrel with Joe (Nowhere to Run, 2010), has gone to ground somewhere he hopes will be safe from the old Special Forces colleagues he suspects have been sent to find and kill him. It looks like both men will be on their own until they collide just in time for a stunning courtroom finale.Joe, who insists that ?I'm not on a side,? spends more time than he'd like in rooms with ceilings, but the mystery is strong enough to compensate, and the revelations about wind farms will curl your hair no matter which side you're on.Pub Date: March 22nd, 2011ISBN: 978-0-399-15735-6Page count: 400ppPublisher: PutnamReview Posted Online: April 4th, 2011Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15th, 2011

A snappy modern western mystery peppered with middle American ideas about wind power and including a peculiar and unbelievable paranoid Rambo-like character. ( )

It all got a bit convoluted at the end but that twist!!!
These are easy reads where you can just surf along and not worry too much about who, what or why. ( )

Game warden Joe Pickett is finally back home in Saddlestring with his wife and daughters, no special projects for the governor or being sent to some else's territory. Except that with his usual knack for getting in trouble, he ends up finding a body tied to a wind turbine. As gruesome as this is, it shortly becomes a nightmare - the dead man is Earl Alden, Joe's mother-in-law's husband and before long Missy becomes the main suspect, not without the help of her ex-husband Bud Longbrake.

As much as Joe does not like Missy (ok, that is probably the understatement of the year), even he cannot believe that she can be the killer - or that she could have ordered it. The problem is that everyone in the county can and does believe it - Missy had not made any friends with her behavior towards Bud or her general demeanor. The sheriff office and the prosecution is sure they have their murderer so Joe needs to find the truth.

As with a lot of the Pickett novels, there is also a back story - in this case the development of wind turbines in Wyoming and how that influences the local communities and nature. As usual C. J. Box uses the real-life laws and actions to build his narrative and ties it into his fictional world, using the novel for a commentary of the politics of DC and the state in real life.

And while dealing with Missy's issue, Joe also reconnects with Nate - after the Joe's betrayal (of a type) in an earlier book, Nate is now back - but so are his enemies. Before long Nate's life is shattered and a lot of the mellowing that we had seen in his character since he was introduced is gone.

By the end of the novel, the murder is solved and Nate gets yet another reminder of his past. ( )

Another solid mystery featuring Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett. I keep coming back to this series. ( )