However, Tatum’s background is well known. A former Army sniper, he has come to his position of sheriff in an odd way, more fully described in the first novel Superior Position. Neither he, nor his deputies are particularly well trained in law enforcement and the reader is treated to the casualness of backwater police procedures.

The story opens as Sheriff Bill hears a gunshot while he is horseback riding in the game preserve. He finds City Councilman Tom Pitcher dead from what immediately appears to be a hunting accident. Pitcher’s son Jerry one of Bill’s deputies.

Tatum radios his dispatcher asking her to find Jerry. Immediately Dr. Ed the coroner appears at the scene, having heard the gunshot as well. Dr. Ed talks Bill through the scene and he realizes that Pitcher was murdered, and the scene had been set to appear as a suicide.

Quickly, Orville, the owner of the preserve, and Jerry appear and the questioning and scene analysis start. There appear to be no other hunters in the area and Bill is forced to treat each one of these people as a suspect because of their apparent proximity to the crime.

Soon thereafter, the FBI shows up in the form of Agent Ritter who is tracking a terrorist unit that has blown up a hospital on an army post, each month for the prior six months. The Colorado area is at the center of the geographical location of these military posts. He is focusing on Belmont because his investigation has shown that there had been a reported explosion there in the prior year.

Bill immediately discounts the link as it had grown out of a drug war, but Ritter persists in his investigations into the backgrounds of the locals. Meanwhile Bill bumbles off on his own and begins to uncover surprising data about some of their pasts himself.

Of course the plots intersect, and another murder heightens the interest; the plot ambles along in an unaffected way until the surprising yet half way expected conclusion.

McNamara draws his characters with a fine brush. The locals come alive to be the eccentric residents that one would place in a backcountry town. Their independent spirits show through, which is not always a great trait in this story. Bill’s character is drawn in a different way than the others.

Much may have been established in the prior novel, but in this one Bill’s inner dialogue with his army sergeant begins to define him as a man. The result: a folksy story about good people in a small town confronted by murder and underground terrorism.

--Thea Davis