No Badge, No Gun marks the 15th appearance of Carl Wilcox, a laid-back traveling sign painter who wanders across Depression-era South Dakota picking up odd jobs and helping catch the odd killer here and there. In this installment, he's been hired by a small-town Lutheran minister to find the person who killed his niece, a teenager who was pretty, popular, and perhaps a little smug in a too-smart-for-this-little-town way. If he manages to finger the killer and not upset the entire narrow-minded town of Jonesville, he gets $100 and a lot more sign-painting business. Harold Adams' Wilcox stories are great little yarns, in part because the prose is so remarkably spare: Words like "terse" and "dry" don't seem to cover it, and perhaps "severe" is best suited for a manner of storytelling which is, after all, describing Depression-era murder in one of the most desolate places on Earth. But mostly the appeal is due to the character of Wilcox himself, a fictional amateur sleuth who doesn't bother with all the moralistic anguish and world-weary editorializing of his counterparts. Wilcox replaces the philosophizing with hard-nosed pragmatism and a sort of tired acceptance that these horrible things just happen. This admittedly different approach could be horribly boring—and Wilcox himself actually kind of is—but the weather-beaten Dakotans with whom he deals treat him with so much suspicion, fear, and outright contempt that he gets away with being perhaps the only fictional serial detective who doubles as a character foil. It's a neat trick that makes for a good book—one that, like all of Adams' novels, serves as great winter reading.