Cabin 21

Nobody has picked a huckleberry in that camp for three days. The man zipped in the tent isn't going to start.

He was a deputy U.S. marshal. The witness he was guarding is gone.

It's August in the far northwest corner of Montana, and the smoke has been down for a month. Dry lightning has the Yaak on fire, and the Forest has closed the upper country to everyone but fire crews. Ryder Lane has his game warden's badge back, on probation, posted as far from Helena as the state could put him. This isn't his case. Nobody wants him on it.

But a crew bus is running closed roads at two in the morning. A contract crew in yellow shirts isn't fighting any fire. A cheerful crew boss named Teddy Sobotka calls everybody chief and knows the name of every person Ryder cares about. And an old trapper's cabin just below the Canadian line has smoke coming from the stovepipe and a secret that reaches thirty years back into Ryder's own family.

When they take one of his own, Ryder and his partner, Ryan Hale, go in the hard way. Getting out alive will cost him every rule he has, and a fire he can never take back.

A hot Montana field thriller about smoke, guilt, and the price of doing the right thing the wrong way.