Adam Colclough lives and works in the West Midlands, he writes regularly for a number of websites, one day he will get round to writing a book for someone else to review.
When the most combative judge in Wyoming’s Twelve Sleep County is the target of an assassination attempt that seriously injures his wife, the questions isn’t so much who would want to kill him; but who wouldn’t? The shot was made from an impossibly long distance, suggesting the work of a shooter with some unique and deadly skills.
Tasked, along with every other police officer in the county, with finding the gunman Game Warden Joe Pickett must also deal with inter departmental rivalries, a grizzly bear attack and the trials of family life. All in a day’s work perhaps, but this time round his fellow townspeople might prove to be more dangerous than the bears.
Remarkably this is the twentieth novel to feature Joe Pickett and there is no sign yet that either he or Box are losing their edge. The plot is rooted firmly in the rivalries of small-town life, not so different from those in the wider world; they just get played out a close range.
On this occasion they include the problems of a justice system where senior figures must always keep one eye on the voters; the opioid crisis and the hubris of humans who treat the natural world as a theme park.
Pickett is a reassuring presence at the centre of the action, a peace officer world -weary enough not to be deceived about the people he deals with but not entirely cynical. A latter-day cowboy trying to do what is right in a world that gets so many things wrong.
Readers new to the books of CJ Box will be charmed enough by this new instalment to seek out his back catalogue. New ones will find this to be one of their better literary discoveries.
