Highway Quartet
5 primary works
Book 1
Edgar Award-winning and New York Times bestselling author C.J. Box delivers a thriller about a troubled cop trying to save his son from a killer in Yellowstone.
Twilight falls on a cold, wet spring day in the mountains of Montana. A cabin smolders in the forest. In the remains of the kitchen, a table set for two; next door, the remains of a single body.
Alerted by hikers, Detective Cody Hoyt is called to the scene. While a brilliant cop, Cody is also an alcoholic struggling with two months of sobriety and it doesn't help that the body in the cabin is his AA sponsor Hank Winters. It looks like the suicide of a man who's fallen off the wagon, but Cody knows Hank better than that. He's convinced its foul play.
But after years of bad behavior directly related to his drinking, Cody has few friends left in the department. And when he shoots and wounds the county coroner in a botched stakeout he is suspended from duty. But Hank was one of the few friends Cody had left and he's determined to find his killer, badge or no badge.
Who was at Hank's cabin? Data pulled from Hank's fire-damaged hard drive leads Cody to a website running wilderness adventures deep into the most remote parts of Yellowstone National Park. Their big trip of the year has just left - a two-week horseback journey into the wild. The very same trip that Cody's estranged teenage son, Justin, has signed up for.
Cody has no choice but to trek deep into the wild himself in pursuit of his son and the truth about Hank. In America's greatest wilderness, Cody is on his own, he's out of time, he's in too deep, he's in the Back of Beyond.
Book 2
Book 3
"Twelve-year-old Kyle Westergaard lives with his single mother in a small North Dakota town that was once just a stopover on the way to The Badlands but has recently boomed and become the heart of the Bakken Oil Field. Even though Kyle has been written off by everyone as "slow" and "learning disabled," he has dreams and deeper thoughts than anyone can imagine. He wants to get out of town, take care of his mother, and give them a better life. While delivering newspapers, he witnesses a car accident where a mysterious bundle flies out and he thinks his fortunes might have changed. The bundle is filled with money and packets of white powder. His mother's boyfriend, T-Lock, tells him it is worth hundreds of thousands and Kyle shouldn't tell anyone. He, T-Lock, will handle it for all of them. Cassie Dewell (The Highway) is the new deputy sheriff in town and the only female in the department. In this newly rich town where men outnumber women twenty-to-one, the police need all the help they can get. With oil comes money. With money comes drugs. With drugs comes violent gangs wanting to corner the market and infiltrate the cops. When the temperature drops to 30 below and a gang war heats up, Cassie realizes she may be in over her head. She becomes the target of someone who is leaving body parts where she is most likely to find them. As she is propelled on a collision course with a murderous enemy, she finds that the key to it all might come in the most unlikely form: an undersized twelve-year-old boy on a bike who keeps showing up where he doesn't belong. Badlands is a masterpiece of suspense, detailing family dynamics and small-town politics in a time and place like no other"--
Book 4
Book 5
The ties that bind can burn you.
Former sheriff's investigator Cassie Dewell is trying to start over with her own private investigation firm. She's her own boss answering to no one - and that's just the way she likes it after the past few tumultuous years. But it's all going to change when an old friend calls in a favour: she wants Cassie to help exonerate a man accused of assaulting a young woman from an influential family.
Against her own better judgment, Cassie agrees. But out by the Bitterroot Mountains of Montana, twisted family loyalty runs as deep as the ties to the land, and there's always something more to the story. The Kleinsassers have ruled this part of Montana for decades, and the Iron Cross Ranch is their stronghold. They want to see Blake Kleinsasser, the black sheep of the family, put away forever for the assault. As Cassie attempts to uncover the truth, she must not only confront a family whose roots are tangled and deadly - she must also face the ghosts of her own past.
With The Bitterroots, master storyteller C.J. Box delivers another searing novel of loyalty, lies, and lethal retribution.