Joe Pickett has been asked by the governor to do something he’d….really, really, rather not do.  The governor wants him to take Elon Musk hunting. Well, not really:   the character’s name is Steve-Two, and he’s an eccentric techbro who has decided that he needs to know what it’s like to hunt, kill, dress, and cook his own meat.   While the embattled governor doesn’t like Joe  – he wants a bootlicker and Joe is 100% Western American Male  –   the Game and Fish  head knows Joe is solid, reliable, and will keep the techbro out of trouble,  whether that involves game laws or grizzly mouths.  And so into the mountains they go, but there’s someone waiting for them who has a beef with  Steve-Two, and Joe may get himself caught in the crossfire of a hashtag war.   Dark Sky combines discussion over the morality of social media platforms – their responsibility in hosting or amplifying poor behavior – and combines it with an action-survival story in the mountains, as Joe is thrown to the wolves and elements.  

Dark Sky is….strangely prescient in that its awkward tech bro Steve-Two, who styles himself such because he regards himself as the second coming of Steve Jobs, owns an up-and-coming social media network, “ConFab” – despite this book being published a year before Elon Musk bought twitter.  Steve-Two arrives in an air of wild idealism and arrogance, shadowed by a gruff security-type and his business partner,  and Joe and another local who have been recruited to help with this hunting trip can only look at each other in befuddlement as  they listen to the breathtaking naiveté that these silicon boys are bringing into the wilderness.  Despite being there for hunting, for instance,  Steve-Two is aghast at the presence of Joe’s guns: he brought a bow that he intends to take his quarry with, and he’s been practicing. Nevermind that the technical ability to shoot a bow is only part of bow-hunting, and one overshadowed by the ability to read the land and the animal behavior to maneuver into a spot where using the bow is actually practical.  (As someone who is only familiar with white-tail bowhunters, I was surprised to learn that yes, there are people who hunt elk with bows.)

It turns out that an Area Man’s daughter was driven to suicide after being bullied relentlessly on ConFab, despite Area Man’s attempts at contacting ConFab  so they could put a stop to it by squelching hashtags or whatever. He blames ConFab and TwoSteve for the amount of social antagonism their platform facilitates and allows to accelerate and target the social media mob’s bete noir of the day.   And…he’s not exactly mentally stable. Soon, Joe is ambushed and fleeing for his life through the mountain wilderness and a bitterly cold mountain night, being hunted himself. Fortunately,  Marybeth has gotten concerned about Joe’s radio silence (his phone was sabotaged) and sicced Nate Romanowski – and Nate is bringing Sheridan, who is now his 24 year old coworker who is riding shotgun.

This was, as ever, a solid thriller, one in which I used my Good Friday day off to read in one sitting — under a perfect blue sky amid the smell of honeysuckle. Not quite the musk of elk or mountain pines, but close enough! There was one bit of humor in this I especially appreciated: when Mary Beth (Joe’s wife, a librarian) confronts the sheriff, she encounters him in flagranti delicto: in the awkwardness that ensues she can only comment to the sheriff’s paramour that she has three overdue books at the library.