In this stunning sequel to Grimes’s Biting the Moon, Andi Oliver, amnesiac and drifter, is still running form the memoryher only memoryof an occurrence in a Santa Fe bed-and-breakfast. Forced to invent details of her past as she manages to hang on to a precarious present (“Lying,” says one co-worker, “it’s what the girl does.”), Andi moves from one small-town job to another across Idaho, across Montana, and into North Dakota.

In Dakota she gets herself hired at Klavan’s, a massive pig farming facility that specializes in the dark art of modern livestock management. As Andi begins to undercover the truth about Klavan’s and its sister facility, Big Sun, a stranger out of her past, who has been stalking her for more than a year, appears at her door demanding information of which she has no memory.

Dakota signals the return of one of Martha Grimes’s most intrepid heroines, a young woman who invents her life step-by-step as she moves through a landscape that throws up one danger after another. Set against the breathtakingly expansive backdrop of the plains, Dakota will reward Grimes’s legion of fans, and readers of western literature as a whole.