Warning: this review contains spoilers for Winterkill, #2 in the Joe Pickett series by CJ Box.

Joe Pickett is cooling his heels in the hind quarters of Wyoming, thanks to ….uh, well, let’s just say repeated acts of insubordination in pursuit of justice, like cold-cocking a petty traffic cop who was about to ruin a federal investigation by doing an extensive search of Joe’s truck (making him miss a one-in-a-lifetime contact with a confidential informant) and refusing to listen to reason. Joe’s staying busy, though, pursuing such miscreants like The Mad Archer, some nut who keeps going around shooting animals with a bow & arrow and leaving them to suffer. But then he gets a call from Marybeth: their daughter Sheridan is getting texts from…well, someone who died six years ago. Someone whose death haunts Joe and Marybeth to this day: their foster daughter April, who was kidnapped by her survivalist birth-mom and then killed when adrenaline-junky goonie boys with FBI badges decided to attack a community of anti-government types for camping for more than two weeks in a national park..Below Zero is an odd entry in the Pickett series, in part because it involves very little game-wardening: instead, when the texts between Sheridan and “April” indicate that she’s in the company of men who are committing a series of grievous crimes in the name of….uh, carbon….credits? …..Sheridan’s phone becomes a lynchpin that unites both Joe’s personal sense of duty with the state’s desire for justice vengeance, only with him trying to balance things so he knows more than they know so they don’t kill innocents in the pursuit of justice as the goonie boys are wont to do.

*sigh* Okay, so…..Below Zero has a title that has no connection to the plot whatsoever, a hook that is utterly compelling, and a general premise that performs about as well as a Ford Edsel. Imagine you have a Chicago criminal authority who, having been diagnosed with terminal cancer, decides he wants to do some good in the world, so he seeks out his estranged son who is an anti-CO2 jihadist and funds a road trip across America to …knock off people who are being very naughty and leaving Bigfoot-size carbon footprints, and he also takes a random girl he rescued from a brothel along. But since the girl is texting the daughter of a warden who is disturbed by the idea that his foster daughter he thought was dead is actually alive and riding shotgun for two criminals, the book turns into a big manhunt, culminating in helicopters and spray-and-pray-esque gunfights , along with the customary twist ending. The daughter connection is what makes this novel, because the criminals were both absurd and obnoxious, especially the jihadist who is such a whiny manchild I was hoping his father would go all Buford T. Justice on his petulant behind. I kept reading the book because the April premise was such a hook: otherwise, the criminals in this were completely ignnorable, positively absurd given Box’s previous abilities to deliver complex stories with criminals whose motives were understandable if not sympathetic. Still, I can’t deny that Box knows how to set and bait a hook, and the only reason I’m not reading the next one right now owes to graduate school.

Coming up, Fenway Pahk, because I did managed to read little nonfiction last week.