Below Zero, the 9th in CJ Box’s Joe Pickett crime series, Chapter 15 begins:

STENKO WAS SICK, Robert was angry, and she was scared. They were in a parking lot outside Buy-Rite Pharmacy someplace in Wyoming in the car they’d stolen. There was only one other car in the lot, a muddy and dented Ford Taurus in a handicapped space. Through the afternoon the sky had darkened and now the wind gusted and rocked the car from side to side on its springs. A herd of tumbleweeds—perfectly yellow, round and hollow, like exoskeletons of large beach balls—swept from somewhere out on the high plains, rolled across the blacktop of the lot and piled up against a high chain-link fence that separated the Buy-Rite from a bank that was closed for the night.

That’s me, she thought. A tumbleweed caught in a fence.

Stenko to Robert: “Morphine. You’ve heard of morphine. I need you to go in there and get me some.”

This is typical of any chapter opening of any CJ Box novel. You are reminded of the dire situation for the characters, the physical description is vivid and refreshed, like tumbleweeds as exoskeletons of large beach balls, the plot is advancing apace. I am rereading this crime series centred on Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett, his savvy wife Marybeth, his feisty daughters Sheridan, April and Lucy, his off-the-grid friend and master falconer Nate Romanowski, and their modern Western adventures battling an extraordinary array of very nasty villains, some of them cops, many high-handed bureaucrats. Indeed, I think it was The Guardian described Pickett as a modern-day Gary Cooper. An upright upholder of the law except when it threatens his loved ones. Often dismissed as Dudley Do-right by Nate and others, he is a poor shot with his handgun and tough on any vehicles issued to him. His stoic determination ploughs on through the often-appalling weather and odds stacked against him as he clocks up 25 adventures and shows no signs of running on empty.

I have not reread a series with such enjoyment. It is not easy to put your finger on why, but I have not felt inclined to reread more than a select few of other character-driven series I rate, like Maigret, Van Der Valk, Lucas Davenport and Virgil Flowers, Dr Ruth Galloway, Stella Darnell, Bernie Gunther, Elvis Cole and Joe Pike, Thorn and Sugarman, Peter Decker and Lina Lazarus, Bruno Courreges, Nora Linde, Alex Delaware and Milo Sturgis, Sean Duffy, Dave Robicheaux and Clete Purcell, Arkady Renko, Commissario Brunetti, DCI Daley and DI Scott, Leaphorn and Chee and Manuelito, DI Peter Shaw and DS George Valentine, John Russell and Effi Koenen, Omar Yussef, Gabriel Allon. Only Sherlock Holmes and Watson compare for rereading.

I care about all those crime-fuelled characters, but Pickett and his frequently threatened family have something else. Is it charm? Pickett is often judged by other characters as a dull-boot, a plodder, a pest with his rules-driven behaviour. Yet he is so loyal to those who deserve it that he crawls through freezing snow and over broken glass and through fire and bullets and terrifying grizzlies with three-inch nails to protect them. As he says a few times, things are going to get real Western real soon. And they do. These are genuinely thrilling books. None more so than when Nate gets involved, often threatening to take over the action and indeed the book, like Joe Pike or DCI Daley’s sidekick DI Brian Scott.

The Picketts are a lot more than non-stop thrills. At every turn there are lyrical descriptions of the rugged Wyoming landscape, as vivid as the Monument Valley images in John Ford Westerns. Despite skewering environmental zealots, Joe’s environmental credentials are memorably established in the first outing Open Season, where he and his daughters save the endangered Miller’s weasel. Pickett’s domestic life has an intimacy unmatched in the genre. I don’t think another writer has induced so many tears. Usually when his children are made safe. Or when his wife supports him through thick and thin. I think the key ingredients are his clean and compelling prose, superb plotting and characters you care about, with a side-order of the bait he dangles at every turn, always with chapter endings that make you impatient to find out what happens, and the author usually switches to another character to make you wait. You can’t wait, but you must. What a guy!