Snake Oil

For fans of C.J. Box, Craig Johnson, and Tony Hillerman - a blizzard-bound Wyoming mystery where a small-town doctor trying to save lives keeps nearly losing his own.

Dr. Patrick Flint drives a rattling International Harvester Travelall through a blizzard to Fort Washakie Health Center on the Wind River Reservation, with his x-ray tech Wes and a frozen radiator hose. By the time he arrives, there's a newborn baby who needs delivering, a dead man named Big Mike Teton in the parking lot, and a tribal police officer who doesn't want Patrick asking questions about either one.

Big Mike's wife Constance is Patrick's colleague. She's beautiful, she's recently widowed, and she does not behave like a grieving widow. The reservation's complex web of loyalties, jealousies, and a threatening note written in black marker suggest that Big Mike did not die of natural causes - and Patrick's missing urine sample confirms it. When someone sabotages Constance's brake line and shoots at Patrick with a shotgun, the BIA officer still calls it a prank. When Patrick ends up tied to a chair with a strychnine syringe coming at his neck, he stops wondering whether he's overreacting.

Meanwhile, Susanne and the children drive through the storm to find him, finding only an intimate-looking newspaper photograph and a beautiful woman grabbing Patrick's hand. Back in Buffalo, Trish's boyfriend crisis unfolds with the same relentless drama as a potential murder investigation.

Snake Oil is set in Buffalo and the Wind River Reservation of 1976 - drawn from author Pamela Fagan Hutchins's own Wyoming years and her family's real Reservation stories. The strychnine in this one is fictional. The cold is not. Complete series: 9 novels.

He delivered a baby, found a dead man, and got poisoned - all in one Wyoming blizzard. His wife dumped ice water on his head. He deserved none of it. Complete series: 9 novels.