Tragedy has fallen on Wyoming’s department of Game and Fish, as one of their district game wardens has been found dead, victim of a very messy suicide. Joe is asked to cover the man’s job for a few weeks, and it’s as high-profile as it gets: Jackson Hole, a valley resort town with some of the highest home prices in all of Wyoming. It’s a place where rich people come to pretend to play cowboy, creating a little California-like enclave in rural Wyoming while driving out the locals through gentrification. Joe’s not a man to seek the spotlight, but he wouldn’t mind a change of scenery and some new faces after his prolonged struggles with the good ol’ boys club in Saddlestring. There is, however, his family to think about: not only does he not want to be more distant from them that his job already makes him, but there are some who genuinely hate Joe and might see hurting his family a path to hurting the warden. Still, duty impels, and so off he goes — to discover another case-closed that doesn’t close quite right for him, and another sheriff who doesn’t like a game warden asking questions with answers that have to be worked for. Out of Range weaves together a rural police drama with character & relationship drama, and was clearly written by someone who has raised a teenager or two. As with the last entry in this series, I finished this in two sittings: a long lunch, followed by an immediate “sit in the yard after work and read” session.

This being my fifth Box book in the last week or so, I took for granted that Joe would get to the bottom of the mystery — so while it was perfectly compelling on its own, I’ll confess to being more wrapped up in the emotional or relationship side of things. Joe’s marriage has been getting a little strained by their financial circumstances and Joe’s sense of duty. Being a game warden is not a nine to five job: depending on the season, Joe may never be home when there’s light enough to see, rising before the dawn and returning home late, sometimes with new injuries. Even so, it doesn’t pay quite enough for a family of four and two horses, and Marybeth has been working on the side to help balance the books. That would be a challenge in itself, but now Sheridan, the oldest daughter, is entering her terrible teens and is copping an attitude bigger than the Tetons. Marybeth so rarely sees Joe that she tells him him being gone fora few weeks won’t be all that noticable, and under that cloud of passive-aggressive gloom Joe departs for Jackson to wrangle bears and land developers and a woman who loves kayaking and is so striking that Joe feels guilty of infidelity just being in the same room with her. The distance makes communicating with Marybeth even more difficult, and on the few times he manages to catch her when she’s not working or arguing with Sheridan, their mutual exhaustion and Marybeth’s belief that Joe is living it up in a resort town don’t make for chicken-soup-and-quilts kinds of conversations. It would be easy, all too easy, to enjoy dinner conversation with someone who isn’t brooding and sniping — especially since the femme fatale is married to a man Joe is looking into as part of the job. He’s been asked to investigate the inexplicable suicide of his forebear, and there’s something strangely consistent about Jackson locals’ take on the warden: six months ago he started going off the rails. What happened six months ago and how could it take a man who was basically Joe Pickett in terms of temperament and character to the morgue, a trip preceded by chronic drunkenness and bar brawls?

Out of Range was another solid hit in this series, with the only disappointment being the loss of a character who was absolutely fascinating in conversation with Joe, and was used (in arguments with Joe) to illustrate Box’s ability to see different sides of the issue. That nuance and grasp of the complexity of both humans and issues like responsible land management or ethical food sourcing also plays into the relationship drama, since the reader knows that both Marybeth and Joe are good people who just struggling to connect for reasons of circumstance, like the weight of their responsibilities. Their own inner turmoil — blaming themselves, blaming the other, blaming themselves for blaming the other — is also well portrayed. On the brighter side, one nasty character who we’re familiar with at this point gets some nice comeuppance.

All around good stuff. Today’s Opening Day so I’m going to start a baseball book, but I forgot to bring it to work so more CJ Box it is. It will be interesting to see how far I go before I tire of game warden antics. Given that I’m attracted to this for many of the same reasons I’m drawn to Red Dead Redemption 2, and given that I haven’t gone a week without playing RDR2 since buying it,…..I may actually read every book in the series before summer, my joke to CK not withstanding!

Also, since I had this song in my head the entire time I was reading it, here you go: