Joe Pickett has encountered a lot of strange stuff in his so-far brief tenure as a game warden, but exploding cows is a first. The culprit here was a cow strapped with explosives, making players of Command and Conquer: Red Alert 2 prime suspects, but since none present themselves it’s probably eco-terrorists. Joe is asked to accompany the sheriff to find the source of the strange explosion, and they are horrified to find the forest bedecked with bloody carnage — and some of the remains are human. A notorious environmental activist was known to be in the area for some kind of mischief, and he’s missing — but the bits and pieces are those of a woman, not a man. Although the sheriff initially thinks the activist hoisted himself and the girl on their own petard, the reader knows what Joe suspects: there’s more to the story.

Savage Run uses a split narrative to follow two older men doing wet work for an unknown party, work that is targeting environment activists and whistle-blowers. While Joe rides the ranges and ponders the anomalies in this case over coffee and pronghorn-gazing, he stumbles upon another little something to get his teeth into: one of the local big shots has a massive elk head in his mansion that could only belong to an un-stripped corpse of a bull found shot last summer, well outside hunting season. It’s one thing to poach, but to kill an animal and leave hundreds of pounds of meat to rot? Joe takes that personal, as he does the fact that the man brazenly lied to him and is smugly confident that his wealth and pull in the government will not only shield him, but make things difficult for Joe — as they nearly did last time when Joe was nearly suspended for looking into a man with political friends. Although the intensity here doesn’t hit Open Season‘s peak, the way Box did that in the first book can’t be replicated without losing its effect, and this novel’s culmination still kept me reading at redlights and in line. In addition to the high points mentioned in my last review — the charm of the western wilderness setting itself, the way Box makes the reader realize that environmental and social issues are far more complex than people on either side of an issue want to admin — I’d also like to comment on how strong a character Box makes of Joe’s wife Marybeth and their daughter, Sheridan. I didn’t mention this in the last review because they were so connected to the endgame, but both of Joe’s ladies are memorable personalities in their own right, especially now that Marybeth is no longer ‘great with child’ and can be more active in the plot.

And yes, I’m already knee deep in the next novel, Winterkill, in which plot happens with 40 inches of snow being dumped by a severe snowstorm.