Good old by Merle Puhl is campaigning to be a United States Senator from Montana, and a former President is coming to Rozette to give him a hand.  This means that the Secret Service is coming, too, and local police detective Ray Bartell is assigned to work with them.  Bartell’s job:  act as the security detail’s tour guide in the realm of local lunatics.  The job starts out interesting, but takes a bad turn when Puhl decides to use one outspoken environmentalist, Henry Skelton, as campaign fodder.  Skelton has a violent past, so the Secret...

When Leo Banks was a young man, he fell hard for a woman named Sarah.  Yet when Banks joined the navy during the Vietnam War, Sarah left him to marry his best friend, Gerry Heyman.  Heyman became a doctor and settled with Sarah in Mauvaisterre, Illinois, his childhood hometown near St. Louis.  He and Sarah had two kids, and life was good, just what both believed that they had always wanted.  After the navy, Banks found his way by freight train to Rozette, Montana.  Against all apparent odds, he became a police officer, completed a career, and retired.  Gerry...

Alexandra Roeg was an artist, and one night she wanted to create a masterpiece by cutting the heart out of the man who raped her.  Proving the case should be easy, she told Detective Leo Banks.  Find the video recording made by a second man, and he would have all the proof anyone would need.

For Banks, the attack brought to mind Donna Sanger, an eighteen year girl dead of an overdose five years ago after being lured into the porn trade by a Johnny Perbix, a recording industry mogul turned land developer.  Unable to save Donna Sanger, Banks was determined to get...

Even in a small town, street rules apply. That means you handcuff everybody. Even the dead and dying. When two cops spend hour after hour together on the street, policing the bleak hours between midnight and dawn of a Montana winter, they live by street rules. They also get to know things about each other. Sometimes, they know more about their partner than about themselves. Or think they do. Often, they become lifelong friends, until something happens. And something always happens in those bleak hours.

How do you treat a friend who kills a man to save your life? Rescues you,...