Reading Freely

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!

These days when Joe Pickett is building fences, it’s on his wife’s mother’s husband’s ranch property, rather than for the State of Wyoming. Joe’s tendency to get into trouble pursuing the truth, coupled with the appointment of a vindictive weasel as Game and Fish’s new director, got him fired as game warden…..but Wyoming’s colorful new governor is on the horn with an offer that might get Joe back in the field. Something funny is going on in Yellowstone National Park: a lawyer just got off the hook there for murdering four people in an area, and the four victims were not randomly chosen. The park rangers aren’t moving at a brisk enough pace for the governor, and knowing Joe’s tendency to gnaw on a problem until he’s gotten to the bottom of it, the governor wants Joe to investigate — unofficially, mostly — on his behalf. Free Fire offers a lot to the reader, but the star is Yellowstone National Park itself,

So, about those murders and the lawyer getting off: turns out because of Yellowstone’s unusual legal history — it was constituted before the two states whose land it’s within were made states — there’s a small stretch of land where a jury cannot formed, and crimes can theoretically not be legally prosecuted. A lawyer, McCann, used that fact to kill four people, but he did so not out of mere sociopathy, but for some ‘underground’ scheming, shall we say. Although this book doesn’t get into deep emotional water like some previous books, it’s not just an action thriller: for Joe, Yellowstone is the source of old pain, being the site of his younger brother’s suicide. The wonder of Yellowstone, though — a place where the Earth itself is alive, shooting forth geysers and sending tremors underfoot — largely helps override the pain, as does the work itself. When Joe arrives, the park rangers are not happy to see him: they’re federal employees with little regard for state authorities, and they’re wary of the unconventional new governor, a folksy populist who is intent on leaving his own mark on the office. One of the rangers, though, takes to Joe, finding him a man very much like her husband. Over the course of two weeks, they get to be friends despite her wariness of his real mission (his cover is that he’s there to interview everyone and compile a summary report for the governor). She proves a useful ally, as does Joe’s mysterious friend Nate, the falconer with the shady past who is very much wanted by the government. As you might guess, Joe finds trouble — and he also finds someone unexpected from his past.

Free Fire was quite different from the other books in this series, though no less a page turner. I liked the dramatic change of scenery, and learning about the geology — and biology! — that makes Yellowstone such a unique park. It looks like from the premise of the next book that Joe Pickett, Secret Agent Man, will continue riding for the colorful governor, so I’m looking forward to that.

“This is Mormon country,” Toomer said. “No bars.”
“Mormons drink,” she said. “Especially if there’s just one of them. I’ve seen ’em go at it at Rocky’s. If there’s two, they watch each other and neither one will drink. It cracks me up.”
“That’s what they always say in elk camp,” Toomer said, laughing with loud guffaws. “If a Mormon comes and he’s alone, hide the whiskey!”

(I’ve heard a different version of this: always invite two Baptists go to fishing with you unless you want one of them to drink all your beer.)

Saddlestring is a small town with a lot of big fish. One of those big fish, Opal Scarlett, has just been thrown in a river — or at least that’s what the sobbing drunk fisherman who threw her in the river claims. She’d been declaring that anyone using the river to transit her property had to pay a toll, state law be damned, and had recently strung up some wire to put that into effect, with ….ah, unfortunate neck consequences. Problem is with Opal Scarlett bein’ dead, that means there’s going to be a struggle for power between her two eldest sons, Arlen and Hank. (There’s also Wyatt, but in this redneck recreation of the splitting of the Carolingian Empire, he’s definitely the Lothar that no one but Carolingian historians remembers.) The Scarletts are major factors in the society of Saddlestring, and in the slow-brewing war for who inherits, every businessman and woman in town has to make their choice whose livery to wear: Arlen or Hank’s. Arlen is the prim and proper businessman whose charm belies the malice underneath, while Hank is….well, up front about being a mean cuss who will do what he wants to get what he wants. Joe Pickett is being sucked into this brewing Shakspearean drama by both the fact that his wife has a growing business that both brothers want to hire, and the fact that both brothers are trying to use state offices like the warden’s to wage lawfare against the other. Unfortunately, he also has a crazy man obsessed with vengeance who wants to ruin Joe, not merely kill him. Add to this equation a new boss who hates Joe and wants to make him miserable and the result is a compelling if infuriating story that results in the potential for a total sea change.

There’s a growing sense of entrapment in this book as Joe’s five years in the town begin to bear fruit that acts against him. A lot of the men who knew his character and worked with it even as they were up to skulduggery are now in prison, or dead; they’ve been replaced by bureaucrats who know nothing of the real world, only their statistics and pivot tables. These politicos and paper-pushers have no use and negative regard for a man who lives in the field and actually makes decisions for which he’s accountable like Joe, and as our game warden tries to figure out how to avoid getting his department trapped in a domestic business war and defend his family against a stalker who does crazy thing like leaving elk heads outside his home or firing into the windows, he finds that his superiors in the agency are just as hateful of him as whomever is terrorizing his family. We start seeing that other Joe, then, the man who despite his shooting deficiencies and tendencies to get beat up by thus, burns with vengeance for justice and can get real western real quick. Joe is aware of this tendency in himself and tries to guard against it, but when his family is threatened the gentle warden turns angry cowboy, not even trying to guard his tongue when talking to his new ‘boss’, who is just as hatable as the bureaucrat in Winterkill despite the fact that his only power lies in the state he bends the knee to: the actual man could be beaten up by an angry middle-schooler. At least the Winterkill villain had charisma and malignant energy, this cretin is more like Garanin in Chernobyl: a revolting weasel whose only power is the state’s. Picture Dolores Umbridge with a pocket protector and a calculator.

As with the previous book, I’m ranging far and wide away from the book’s happenings because I don’t want to give away the plot. Suffice to say there are direct connections to the first two books, as the stalker blames Joe for the death of his brother and a young child: he’s not a sociopath, since he definitely feels emotions and such, but he’s definitely off his rocker and calculating enough to be scary. The climax happens with a terrific drought-ending gully-washer that poses a challenge for Joe and the other law enforcers, and creates several scenes that add to the creepifying and scary experience. Definitely looking forward to continuing! (Though, I do need to incorporate some nonfiction because it’s Opening Day and it’s the middle of the month and I haven’t read anything for the Science Survey…….)

Happy to report that I read most of this book and the one previous in a manner befitting the books: outside, by sunlight and nary a screen involved.