Having recently lost his job as a Wyoming game warden, Joe Pickett is recruited by the devious governor Rulon to oversee a murder investigation involving a confessed killer and overlapping jurisdictions that enabled the man's release.

Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett's family is stunned when their daughter Sheridan receives a text message from April, a foster child they believed had died six years earlier, and when Joe links the calls to the scenes of environmental crimes, he knows he must somehow find a way to rescue April--if indeed the messages are from her.

When an elite special ops team recruits him to help defeat a domestic terror cell in Wyoming's Red Desert in exchange for expunging his criminal record, Nate Romanowski, assisted by Joe Pickett, discovers a sinister agenda behind the operation.

When a woman is killed in an apparent hunting accident on an island off the coast of Maine, newly promoted Warden Investigator Mike Bowditch discovers that the victim, a controversial author writing about a local recluse, died of other causes.

While it's elk season in the Rockies, it's obvious to Game Warden Joe Pickett that a different kind of hunter is on the prowl. The body of a hunter is found, strung up and gutted, and the only clues are a spent cartridge and a poker chip found lying next to the body. Fear resonates as a result and the governor is forced to end hunting season early.

As Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett races against time to save an endangered species, he finds himself plunged into a deadly mystery that soon threatens his family and the life he loves.