Lizard Skin
Checking out a reported robbery at Joe Bell's truck stop, Montana State Highway Patrolman Beau McAllister stumbles upon a shootout between Joe Bell and a band of Dakota Indians
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Carsten Stroud has cracked the cop code of silence. In Close Pursuit, a New York Times nonfiction bestseller and then in his first novel, the award-winning Snipers Moon, he exposed the jagged edge of life - and death - in the New York City Police Department. Now in his new novel, Stroud draws us down a different kind of mean street, a place where the law is a single flashing light on an open highway or deserted back road, a tiny beacon in a sea of darkness.Sergeant Beau McAllister of the Montana State Highway Patrol has a formidable service record, an engaging wit, and a quick trigger-finger. In the vast, lonely grandeur of Yellowstone County, Beau knows the potential for human cruelty and ugliness is always there, coiled in silent waiting like a rattlesnake in an arroyo.When violence touches Beau's life on a slow Friday afternoon, it arrives in a rattler-fast strike. He checks out a reported armed robbery at Joe Bell's truck stop and finds an amazing shootout in progress between an enraged Joe Bell, whose wild shooting endangers the whole area, and a band of Dakota Indians firing back - with bows and arrows. When the smoke clears, a Dakota boy is dead, Beau McAllister has been forced to shoot Joe Bell in the butt, and Beau's own problems with the law have just begun.But what appears to be a bizarre incident fueled by out-of-control tempers is actually the first crack in a conspiracy of astonishing corruption. And as Beau starts his investigation, he does not realize he is being shadowed by someone equally determined to get at the truth: Gabriel Picketwire, an enigmatic Lakota Indian with a link to the dead and wounded Native Americans. In the hard, rocky Montana terrain, the two men head toward a fateful collision, closing in on sinister forces that have taken a terrible liberty with other people's lives.Once again, with searing intensity and laser precision, Carsten Stroud has penetrated the thin blue line. Lizardskin touches a raw nerve and lays open the painful, private, perilous world inside the policeman's soul.
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