Carsten Stroud has cracked the cop code of silence. In Close Pursuit, a New York Times nonfiction bestseller and then in his first novel, the award-winning Snipers Moon, he exposed the jagged edge of life - and death - in the New York City Police Department. Now in his new novel, Stroud draws us down a different kind of mean street, a place where the law is a single flashing light on an open highway or deserted back road, a tiny beacon in a sea of darkness. Sergeant Beau McAllister of the Montana State Highway Patrol has a formidable service record, an engaging wit, and a quick trigger-finger. In the vast, lonely grandeur of Yellowstone County, Beau knows the potential for human cruelty and ugliness is always there, coiled in silent waiting like a rattlesnake in an arroyo. When violence touches Beau's life on a slow Friday afternoon, it arrives in a rattler-fast strike. He checks out a reported armed robbery at Joe Bell's truck stop and finds an amazing shootout in progress between an enraged Joe Bell, whose wild shooting endangers the whole area, and a band of Dakota Indians firing back - with bows and arrows. When the smoke clears, a Dakota boy is dead, Beau McAllister has been forced to shoot Joe Bell in the butt, and Beau's own problems with the law have just begun. But what appears to be a bizarre incident fueled by out-of-control tempers is actually the first crack in a conspiracy of astonishing corruption. And as Beau starts his investigation, he does not realize he is being shadowed by someone equally determined to get at the truth: Gabriel Picketwire, an enigmatic Lakota Indian with a link to the dead and wounded Native Americans. In the hard, rocky Montana terrain, the two men head toward a fateful collision, closing in on sinister forces that have taken a terrible liberty with other people's lives. Once again, with searing intensity and laser precision, Carsten Stroud has penetrated the thin blue line.

Genre: Mystery