Dead in the Scrub — B.J. Oliphant

TWO PEOPLE WENT INTO THE DENSE WOOD OF COLORADO SCRUB OAK. ONLY ONE CAME OUT.

Intrepid rancher Shirley McClintock hasn't seriously lost her temper for two or three weeks, but when, struggling to put a wounded deer out of its misery, she stumbles over a human skeleton half-buried in autumn leaves, she does. A second murder, accomplished with the same arrow that had pierced the body of the deer, sends her on the warpath. Impatient with the ineffectual bumbling of the sheriff, she launches her own investigation.

The crimes are mysterious and apparently unrelated, but in both she catches a whiff of bigotry and sin, a sense of something rotten in the town's religious and banking communities. Only proof is lacking, but that, when she finds it, cannot be used. Not without puffing the person nearest her heart into mortal danger.