It’s been a long time since I actually thrilled by a thriller — so emotionally charged up by it that I wanted to will the clock to slow down so I could finish the final chapters at lunch and not have to wait a long afternoon of work to find out what is about to happen. C.J. Box’s Open Season introduces Joe Pickett, a newly-minted game warden in rural Wyoming. Although Joe knows his business, science-wise, he’s still growing into the role as quasi-lawman, with rookie mistakes trailing him and a growing realization that this job has a lot more dirty politics than environmental stewardship. When a mortally wounded man staggers into Joe’s yard and dies on his woodpile, Joe’s desire to find out the truth of what happened puts him at odds with other lawmen and his bosses, who are fine with the write-off explanation that presents itself — and his digging puts both himself and his family into severe peril, resulting in a genuinely nail-me-to-the-seat thriller I enjoyed so much I’ve started on my third Box book in a week’s time.

A huge part of Open Season’s appeal for me was how different it is compared to most police thrillers: it’s rural. It would be hard not to be rural, given that it’s set in Wyoming, but this is especially rural because Joe is a game warden and as such spends a lot of time out in the open country, building elk fences and counting herds and investigating in-country hunting camps on horseback to make sure everyone has proper licenses and aren’t bagging more animals than the herds can contain. This is a book filled not with suits and hoods, but working-class men who wear old jeans and scuffed boots and probably keep homemade beef jerky in their pockets. As someone from a rural area, it’s wonderfully refreshing. The rural-ness is a key part of the plot, too, because there’s a potential development that could bring a lot of jobs into the area and save the dying town of Saddlestring, buuuut the woodpile corpse and what Joe’s investigation of him brings out could threaten that. This introduces another strong aspect of the book — and the second book which I read immediately thereafter — in that this is not a “lecture the reader” type book like Gray Mountain: there’s both moral and consequential ambiguity here, without sacrificing a truly hatable antagonist. I love how Joe has to weigh real consequences either way he goes: it makes his character, by which I mean his moral core, salient in a way I don’t see that often in modern fiction.

As mentioned, I’ve already read this book’s sequel and have the series’ third title in my bag, so…yeah, CJ Box is going to be something I remember 2025 for, I suspect.