The Mad Professah Lectures: BOOK REVIEW: Winterkill (Joe Pickett, #3) by C.J. Box

Thursday, October 01, 2020

BOOK REVIEW: Winterkill (Joe Pickett, #3) by C.J. Box

Winterkill is the third book in C.J. Box’s long-running series featuring Wyoming Fish and Game Warden Joe Pickett as the main character. I was reasonably impressed with the first two book in the series, Open Season and Savage Run, mostly by their pacing and compact form. But since I generally prefer to read mystery/thriller books either written by female authors or with female protagonists I wasn’t in a particular hurry to continue reading books in this series starring a taciturn, emotionally inarticulate, highly principled “Lone Ranger” type of guy.

However I had forgotten what a large role Joe’s family, in particular his wife Marybeth and daughter Sheridan, often play in the story. Sheridan was a huge part of the second book, Savage Run. It is also definitely true that Box is a master at building suspense, but it was the centrality of Joe’s domestic life, as well as his singular devotion to being the good guy that really stood out for me in Winterkill and has convinced me to put the many sequels higher on my burgeoning TBR (to-be-read) queue.

Much of the story in Winterkill is animated by problematic and criminal behavior by problematic and criminal people. The book begins with Joe catching a fellow natural resources bureaucrat in the act of violating basic hunting quotas and through a series of seriocomical events we get our first dead body just as a huge snowfall deluges Joe’s Twelve Sleep County. (Isn’t that a great name?)

The basic contour of the plot in Winterkill involves an inexorable build up to a seemingly unavoidable violent clash between a group of anti-government squatters and federal and state law enforcement officers who mutually detest each other. Joe does his darndest to try and help members of both sides see reason and past each other’s grievances, largely to no avail. This is the primary source of narrative tension in the book, and it is intensified further by involving the youngest member of Joe’s family, a girl named April whom Marybeth and Joe have been foster parenting for several years but whose adoption has been stalled by administrative inertia and bad luck. Despite abandoning her daughter like a sack of flour when she skipped town, April’s biological mother is back in town and is intimating she wants her daughter back (and of course she's a member of the caravan of anti-government crazies).

Overall, Box again shows how interesting and compelling a read he can make from sparse ingredients such as a relatively straightforward plot, a well-drawn but familiar character in Joe Pickett and a modest page count. The unusual nature of the setting, a sparsely populated Wyoming town in winter, with unfamiliar characters caring about unfamiliar issues like hunting and fishing and natural conservation is another feature of these books. Together these pieces come together catalytically to produce a mystery which is more energetic than its component parts.

Title: Winterkill (Joe Pickett, #3).
Author: C.J. Box.
Paperback: 352 pages.
Publisher: Berkley Books.
Date Published: June 1, 2004.
Date Read: August 31, 2020.