A harsh winter and a heated land dispute make for a deadly combination in this gripping installment of A. B. Guthrie Jr.’s acclaimed mystery series
It’s forty degrees below zero in Midbury, Montana, and the cattle are dying. Not from the frigid temperatures, but under bizarre circumstances that stir up rumors of blood cults and UFOs. As if that weren’t bad enough, a strip-mining company has moved into town with plans to tear apart the land in search of coal.
Sheriff Chick Charleston and his loyal sidekick, Jason, try to keep tensions between the outsiders and the locals from boiling over, but when a murder occurs at the Chicken Shack, the miners’ local hangout, the situation threatens to spin out of control. To save a community and a way of life that mean everything to them, the sheriff and Jase must track down a killer whose blood runs as cold as a Great Plains winter.
A. B. Guthrie Jr. (1901–1991) was an award-winning American novelist, screenwriter, historian, and environmentalist. Born in Indiana, he was six months old when his father brought the family west to the Montana territory. Guthrie graduated from the University of Montana with a degree in journalism and worked as a reporter and editor for two decades before receiving a Nieman fellowship from Harvard University. During his grant year, he began to seriously pursue his interest in writing fiction. His first major novel, The Big Sky (1947), was followed by the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Way West (1949). Guthrie’s popular mystery series featuring Montana sheriff Chick Charleston earned a Silver Spur Award from the Western Writers of America and an award from the National Cowboy& Western Heritage Museum. The five books in the series are Wild Pitch (1973), The Genuine Article (1977), No Second Wind (1980), Playing Catch-Up (1985), and Murder in the Cotswolds (1989). In 1954 Guthrie’s screenplay for the film Shane was nominated for an Academy Award.