Open Season

In the town of Twelve Sleep, Wyoming, where almost everyone hunts, Joe Pickett has just taken up the role of game warden. However, game wardens are seldom well-liked, particularly ones like Joe who refuse to accept bribes or turn a blind eye. He takes it personally when he discovers a local hunting outfitter dead and stretched out on the woodpile outside his state-owned house. The outfitter, with whom he had previously had run-ins, had to have had a motive for selecting his property and woodpile as the place to pass away. Joe keeps looking into the case even after the "outfitter murders," as the local media named them when the two more deaths were found, are solved. He is uncomfortable with the copious explanation that the police gave.

As Joe investigates the killings more thoroughly, he quickly learns that the outfitter brought more than just death to his doorstep. Inside his woodpile now lives a rare species that was once believed to be extinct. However, any possibility of InterWest, a multinational natural gas business, constructing an oil pipeline that would carry the firm billions of dollars across Wyoming, via the mountains and woods of Twelve Sleep, would be destroyed if news spreads about the presence of this endangered species. Joe is getting closer to losing all he values as he learns the truth about the outfitter killings, endangered animals, and InterWest.