Caldwell & Pike · Book Two
Cold Track
Best in order
Read free with Kindle Unlimited.
A five-year-old went missing from a motel yard in Virginia City at dusk. By ten o'clock the county had written the word wandered in a book and gone home to bed.
Grant Caldwell and Jamie Pike were only in Nevada because Grant wanted to see a dead cowboy town.
Twenty years together. One year married. One year out of the Army. Nobody's problem and nobody's business, right up until a woman put both hands flat on her register book and said her son was five.
They are very good at exactly this. That is the trouble.
Because Grant and Jamie can read ground no search party can read, and there is no version of the truth they can hand a deputy that does not end with both of them in a cage or a lab. Everything they know, they know illegally. Everything they can prove is worth nothing.
Five days. A hill full of nothing. A truck nobody remembers seeing. And a face on a billboard that every child in the county already trusts.
COLD TRACK is the second Caldwell & Pike novel. Wolves among us, a couple who are the calm and not the crisis, and a happy ending guaranteed for the people who have earned one.
No cheating. No third-act breakup. No cliffhanger.
What’s in it
Explicit and graphic m/m sex, fully on the page, plain words and no fade to black. Never gratuitous. It is always doing a job.
Not omegaverse. Wolf shifters, established couple.
HEA guaranteed. No cheating. No third-act breakup. No cliffhanger.
Content notes
This book involves a missing child and scenes of children in survival peril. Nobody's ending is tragic.
There is also casual racism, said out loud by people in the town, and the book does not let it stand.
The hunting
The leads are wolves and they hunt. Grant kills a winter-thin yearling deer at night and it is how two starving children eat that night. Two paragraphs, and the book does not linger on it.
Nothing else is hunted and no animal is hurt by a person.
Specifics, with spoilers
A five-year-old is taken and left outdoors, and he and a teenage girl go six days on almost nothing before they are found. Both children survive and both recover.
Nobody lays a hand on either child at any point. The man who takes the boy never touches him and the book is explicit about that. There is no violence against children on the page, no sexual harm to anyone, and no character death.
The hunger and the thirst are on the page and they are not softened.
One more, for readers who need the ending to hold. Nobody is ever arrested for it. What happens to him instead does not happen in a courtroom.
