Open Season by C.J. Box

 I read three very different books in the past month. Two were mysteries, one was a historical woman's fiction. The great thing about belonging to a book club and read and review sites, is the exposure to books I may not pick up on my own. I will do separate posts this week or this would be really long.

Open Season by C.J. Box - Joe Picket #1

Our Mystery Book Club read C.J. Box for our January meeting, any C.J. Box book. I had not read any books by this author so I chose the first book in the C.J. Box series. Several of the members of the book club had recommended this series for years.

About: "Joe Pickett is the new game warden in Twelve Sleep, Wyoming, a town where nearly everyone hunts, and the game warden--especially one like Joe who won't take bribes or look the other way--is far from popular. When he finds a local hunting outfitter dead, splayed out on the woodpile behind his state-owned home, he takes it personally. There had to be a reason that the outfitter, with whom he's had run-ins before, chose his backyard, his woodpile to die in. Even after the "outfitter murders," as they have been dubbed by the local press after the discovery of the two more bodies, are solved, Joe continues to investigate, uneasy with the easy explanation offered by the local police. As Joe digs deeper into the murders, he soon discovers that the outfitter brought more than death to his backdoor: he brought Joe an endangered species, thought to be extinct, which is now living in his woodpile. But if word of the existence of this endangered species gets out, it will destroy any chance of InterWest, a multi-national natural gas company, building an oil pipeline that would bring the company billions of dollars across Wyoming, through the mountains and forests of Twelve Sleep. The closer Joe comes to the truth behind the outfitter murders, the endangered species and InterWest, the closer he comes to losing everything he holds dear."

My take: I actually listened to this as an audio book. I will say at first I didn't think I would like it. Some of the characters are a bit too rough and crude for my liking and that is accentuated  when it is spoken words. But I ended up liking the book. Joe is a nice guy and great family man. His wife is a special person as the ending shows. I loved their daughter Sheridan. I believe she is 10 years old in the book but she is very smart, has a lot of common sense, brave and able to think things out way beyond her years. The main characters are very likeable but the other characters were pretty despicable. The ending was good - bittersweet. I would like to read more of this series. 

About the author: "C. J. Box is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of 24 novels including the Joe Pickett series. He won the Edgar Alan Poe Award for Best Novel (Blue Heaven, 2009) as well as the Anthony Award, Prix Calibre 38 (France), the Macavity Award, the Gumshoe Award, two Barry Awards, and the 2010 Mountains & Plains Independent Booksellers Association Award for fiction. He was recently awarded the 2016 Western Heritage Award for Literature by the National Cowboy Museum as well as the Spur Award for Best Contemporary Novel by the Western Writers of America in 2017. The novels have been translated into 27 languages. Box is a Wyoming native and has worked as a ranch hand, surveyor, fishing guide, a small town newspaper reporter and editor, and he co-owns an international tourism marketing firm with his wife Laurie. They have three daughters. An avid outdoorsman, Box has hunted, fished, hiked, ridden, and skied throughout Wyoming and the Mountain West. He served on the Board of Directors for the Cheyenne Frontier Days Rodeo. Box lives in Wyoming."

Next: The Case of the Canterfell Codicil