The following reviews are of early Joe Pickett stories, with one later one thrown in, not long after the top villain rodeo rider Dallas Cates makes his first appearance abusing one of Joe’s daughters. There will be a reckoning for Dallas and his dysfunctionally evil family, who equal the pernicious Snopes family in Faulkner novels. From the series get go Joe confronts vivid villains with a limited set of macho skills but a righteous persistence to bring bad men to book and protect his frequently threatened family. Every story in the Box set is worth five stars.
Open Season 1
I had been enthusing to a friend about how great the Craig Johnson series with Sheriff Walt Longmire as the modern-day Western hero was when he suggested I should try CJ Box. Not a great name, rather small, but you should not judge a book by the shortness of its author’s name, right? The hero is a rather inept young game warden checking elk licences in a Wyoming backwater. He has his gun taken off him by a stroppy poacher and becomes the laughingstock of the redneck townsfolk. Then the poacher turns up dead in his woodpile and Joe gets his first murder to investigate.
Meantime his eight-year-old daughter Sheridan has discovered a posse of a rare creature the Miller’s weasel, which is indeed true and on the endangered list. No chance Joe is on my endangered list. The visceral threat to his daughter for adopting and hiding her pets brings out Joe’s righteous fatherly wrath and the pursuit and tension and tears flow all the way to the end of a memorable first outing for Joe and me. There is plenty of action in this epic wilderness setting and conflicts between environment protectors and the hunter-gatherers and politicians and bureaucrats feathering their status nests.
Craig has chalked up 26 editions, CJ one behind, but I have lost touch with Walt. Sorry Craig, CJ is now for me. The conundrum is that the Longmire books have become a successful TV series, the Pickett TV series dropped. I recall CJ would not approve the early attempts to make a TV series. Maybe he should have stuck to his guns. For sure I will stick to his gun-shy hero.
Savage Run 2
An extreme environmentalist has been steel-spiking trees lethally for the harvesters, but he is spiked himself by a cow full of explosives. A war between environmentalists and ranchers requires game warden Joe Pickett to investigate the murder, but his sense of what is right also involves investigating a wealthy rancher who kills not for food but for a trophy on his wall. Joe’s dogged pursuit of the bad guys takes him to Savage Run, an impenetrable canyon where knowledge of how Cheyenne and Pawnee coped provides a way out, if Joe and his companions are game for it. I was impressed with the way Box wove Native American lore into the story, reminding me how much I enjoyed the Navajo detective stories of Tony Hillerman and his daughter Anne. This Box outing has literally a cliff-hanger of a conclusion to a fascinating story of environmentalists and ranchers both right and wrong.
Winterkill 3
Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett investigates elk being slaughtered and arrests the perp. Unfortunately, the perp gets hold of Joe’s handcuffs and snaps him to the steering wheel and takes off. Joe has his Leatherman tool to release the wheel and take off into the blinding snow. He catches the perp, impaled by an arrow. Let the action continue.
Badass Feds pursue a bunch of anti-government radicals blamed for the arrow execution into Joe’s town of Saddlestring. The Feds prepare to wipe them out in another Waco-type incident. It becomes very personal with Joe’s adopted daughter among those threatened. Handily Joe acquires a sidekick the falconer Nate Romanoski who is the equal of the bad guys. A lot going on, the supposed good guys simply the worst, but Box keeps it clear and fast as the rivers that run through it. If this sounds overwrought, then you can be assured Joe Pickett is a decent man and very persistent. And kinda clumsy.
In Plain Sight 6
The core attraction of this modern-day Western series is the development of Pickett’s family and friend Nate. This time Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett has a nasty new boss out to get him, an incompetent sheriff and his oldest daughter Sheridan friends with the daughter of one of the brothers involved in a range war to claim a huge ranch. Joe expects things to ‘go Western’ and they do, with his wife Marybeth also involved while trying to reconcile the accounts she is employed to do for two feuding brothers. Stalked by a criminal seeking revenge, Joe gets badly beaten but stoically works to protect his family and resolve this property dispute. You can hardly catch breath with the turbo-charged plot, but the lyrical descriptions of the rugged Wyoming wilderness balance the action.
Free Fire 7
A lawyer murders four men in Yellowstone National Park and walks free because of a legal loophole, nobody lives in this ‘Zone of Death’ to form a jury. This was a real loophole until closed, but it makes for one of the most fascinating Joe Pickett pursuits. He has been fired and is fretting through ranch work when the engagingly unconventional Democratic Governor Rulon of a Republican-voting State hires Joe to investigate these seemingly senseless murders, but he is on his own if anything goes wrong. If he gets it right, he gets his game warden job back. Joe soon finds out there is monumentally illegal activity going on in the park involving bio-mining of the protected springs. He needs the unrestrained help of his friend Nate to survive a refreshingly different conspiracy of wealthy bad guys.
The Disappeared 18
I scarf up the latest Joe Pickett the way I used to with the latest Elmore Leonard lowlifes or Dave Robicheaux fighting the good fight down those mean streets and swamps. A lot of the attraction of Pickett is this Dudley Do-righter (not my tag, comes from another character) somehow survives the overwhelming odds, due in no small part to his unlikely buddy the outlaw falconer Nate Romanowski, whom I wait impatiently to appear, with savvy support from wife Marybeth and increasingly oldest daughter Sheridan, apprentice falconer. The scenes are often brutal, the baddies very bad, but this modern-day Gary Cooper stands tall and staunch. The extreme scenery of Wyoming is as always compellingly primal and beautiful. This time a woman is missing, and Joe is tasked by a tasking new Governor to locate her, while Nate gets him involved in his prey problems involving the dirty tricks of clean energy tsars. Compulsively good as every Joe Pickett story.