Reading Freely

Joe Pickett, Game Warden, is not a fan of his mother-in-law, but he wouldn’t figure her for murder. One morning while making his rounds and checking herds, he notices something odd about the wind turbines being installed on the far ridges of Mommy Dearest’s property: one of them has a body attached to it, that of her latest husband. Missy is soon clapped in irons by the swaggering Sheriff McClanahan, but there’s something odd and improbable about all this. So, Joe takes off his Game Warden hat and puts on his private investigator hat and goes to work. At the same time, Nate Romanowski, the wild man with a secret commando past, thinks he is being hunted by some of his former colleagues, especially after a personal tragedy befalls him and he begins looking for blood. These two cases, intriguingly, aren’t as separate as they seem. Cold Wind is a fun Pickett mystery-thriller, though largely removed from outdoors action.

Missy, the mother-in-law, has been a thorn in Joe’s side for the entire series: she is an ambitious human predator, always sizing up men to see if it’s possible for her to dump her current husband and marry into a better clas, and through her social and business machinations she’s made herself the queen of quite the little empire — even calling herself Duchess Alden from time to time. Even before she was a land magnate, she looked down imperiously on Joe, declaring that her brilliant daughter deserved more than marriage to a ‘park ranger’. Whatever their differences, though, Joe has no interest in seeing his girls’ grandmother imprisoned, especially after his initial investigation indicates that Earl Alden, the deceased, was up to all kinds of speculation and fraud that might’ve made him the target of hundreds of people. Along the way readers are treated to a discussion of wind turbine politics and economics in Box’s customary from-both-sides fashion. The ending was unusual and a bit of a surprise, but compelling all the same.

I’ve already started the next book, where it looks like the Romanowski thread from this book will loom front and center.

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.

Terror in the deep woods! A hunter has been deliberately killed, then field-dressed like a deer. The gruesome sight makes Wyoming law enforcement realize that two prior ‘accidents’ may be connected, and Joe Pickett, Game Warden at Large, is asked by the governor to join the investigation, offering his knowledge of the land to the feds who are coming. Joe’s enemy, his boss, is fixated on the case, so much so that he welcomes Joe’s skills even if he despises Joe himself. During the early part of the investigation, though, several members of the party tracking and searching for evidence are killed, resulting in all hunting, fishing, and outdoor recreation being suspended in Wyoming. Considering that licenses and taxes from outdoors-oriented tourists are what pays the bills in Wyoming, panic and confusion erupt. The result is yet another excellent thriller from CJ Box, one that uses the killer’s point of view to build suspense and add to the drama.

At one point in this book, Joe visits his old mentor, the disgraced Vern, who looks at him and tells Joe that he’s changed: he’s gotten hard. Joe is definitely changing as a character, and well he should given how many years have gone by since the series began, and by what he’s endured. Joe is still morally square and stubborn about getting to the truth, but he’s seen so much violence and corruption — and has himself taken life — that his soul is getting grey-haired even if his skull isn’t, and his temper is more feisty, something we see several times here in his altercations with his boss. Of course, it’s unlocked by the sheer amount of stress he is under at the moment, what with being actively hunted by an anonymous madman, at the cost of a friend. Although the setup appears to be some eco-terrorist raging against hunters, it wouldn’t be a Pickett book without there being more to the store, and I liked the way Box misdirected readers through multiple angles.

I don’t usually post weekend reviews, but I’ve already read the sequel to this, so…move `em on, head `em up, cut `em out, Pick-ett! Hah!