Cotton Pickens, the unforgettable hero of William Johnstone's classic Blood Valley, returns in a tale of a lawless Montana mining district, a 16-year-old widow and a man who always finds new ways of laying down the law Cotton Pickens' parents had a cussed sense of humor, but there's nothing funny about the way the man can draw a gun. Now he's in the middle of a mining camp district slowly being crushed under the iron fist of another misnamed, hardheaded fellow, Carter Scruples. With Cotton facing off against Scruples, a beautiful young woman caught in-between and a band of outlaws living high and mighty in a dry-docked Pullman Palace Car, the town of Swamp Creek is surely going to get blown sky high.

And when time comes to put the pieces back together againCotton will do his picking one bullet at a time.