Collins' latest is a variation on the western werewolf premise and an extension of themes she has been developing since her debut. Narrator Billy Skillet is the 150-year-old shapeshifter offspring of a human mother and vargr(werewolf) father. The first half of Billy's tale is a picaresque romp in which the competing demands of his human and feral sides drive him from the west-Texas Comanches among whom he's raised in the mid-19th century into the white man's world, where he works as a saloon attendant, a drummer for a traveling medicine show and a sidekick for a vampire gunslinger.