Three-Inch Teeth by C.J. Box

Published by G.P. Putnam's Sons on February 27, 2024

When C.J. Box isn’t pandering to readers who are outraged about windmills and their deep state fantasies, he’s capable of writing entertaining stories. Three-Inch Teeth stays away from politics, apart from adding local color with phrases like “libtard” and “Hollywood elites.” It wouldn’t be authentic to depict Wyoming without portraying the extremism that infects a large share of the state’s residents. The only real-world political issue in the story’s background is an ongoing gripe by private landowners that people who cross from public land to public land by stepping from one adjacent corner to another are “trespassing” on their private land when their elbows invade private airspace. A momentary incursion by elbows is harmful why? I guess you need to live in Wyoming to understand.

A political issue that only exists in the context of the novel involves a race for sheriff between two candidates who, like most sheriffs, have not impressed series protagonist Joe Pickett. One of the candidates will play a surprising role in the story.

Joe is a game warden who spends most of his time dealing with violent criminals rather than unlicensed hunters. Dallas Cates will be familiar to readers who have followed the series. Cates is a rodeo cowboy who is famed in Wyoming for winning a bunch of rodeo trophies. He’s also famed for committing crimes and being caught by Joe and his buddy Nate Romanowski, as was chronicled in a couple of earlier novels in this series. He has a grudge against Joe and Nate, as well as the prosecutor and judge who sent him to prison. His release makes it possible to seek vengeance.

Cates is joined by another villain from novels past. Three-Inch Teeth is a bad guy’s reunion.

The book starts with a grizzly bear attack on a young man who plans to propose to Joe’s daughter. Series readers will be familiar with the young man and Pickett’s daughter Sheridan, who is too good for the young man, at least from Joe’s perspective (and probably from Sheridan’s).

The plot follows Cates as he engages in a far-fetched murder spree using simulated bear attacks to kill his victims. The means he uses to commit the crime seem too complex to be workable but hey, by modern thriller standards, the murders are almost credible.

Box’s stories are often infused with violence but this one is bloodier than most. A supporting cast of characters that has developed over the years is significantly reduced by the end of the book. A surviving bad guy sets up more mayhem in the future.

Box keeps the story moving, creates a reasonable amount of tension, and is true to his characters. Joe continues to plod along until he gets the job done, displaying no discernable personality as he does so, while Nate is a psychopath who does the dirty work while Joe looks the other way. The story is entertaining and, while I would be tempted to recommend it just to applaud Box for avoiding silly references to culture war issues, the novel earned a recommendation on its merits.

RECOMMENDED

Storm Watch by C.J. Box

Published by G.P. Putnam's Sons on February 28, 2023

Storm Watch could have been titled Red Meat. I mean, you’ve got the Chinese Communist Party. You’ve got climate change denialism and complaints about mask mandates. You’ve got “Silicon Valley activists and the Hollywood elite” who see Wyoming libertarians as a threat to their way of life. You’ve got “coastal elites” who want to “shut down our energy industry, our cattle ranches, our timber industry, and just about every part of our American way of life. They’ve never owned a gun, gone to church, or served in the military.” You’ve got “Washington D.C. elites” who eliminated the “legitimate livelihoods” of Keystone pipeline workers. You’ve got complaints about the “deep state,” electric cars, and “children being indoctrinated and corrupted in their schools by unscrupulous teachers and administrators who preached gender fluidity and taught critical race theory.” You’ve got hysterical claims that “they’re coming for our guns.” You’ve got the FBI at the vanguard of a war against conservatives. You’ve got the phrases “domestic terrorists” and “insurrection” appearing in quotation marks to signal a disbelief that the phrases represent reality.

To be fair, the protagonist of this series, Joe Pickett, does not personally embrace any of this nonsense. Neither does Joe denounce it. Joe is studiously free from opinions. At least, he feels no need to express any opinions that don’t relate to his job as a game warden, western apparel, his mother-in-law, or his daughters’ boyfriends. Nate Romanowski, the supporting character whose role is to represent paranoid members of the far right, nods approvingly at many of the rants, giving far right readership a reason to keep coming back to the series. Nate is one of theirs.

Nate complains that the Secretary of the Interior makes decisions that benefit the entire nation, not just Wyoming. He also complains that public lands exist mostly in the West. Yeah, but that’s not a red/blue issue. The state with the most federally owned land is a blue state (Nevada), and the percentage of federal ownership in California is about the same as it is in Wyoming. Federal land ownership isn’t some conspiracy that targets red states, but fact-checking is noticeably absent in Storm Watch.

Joe and Nate both recognize that many of the people who embrace these views are losers and meth addicts. One of their apologists argues that they are “men whose dignity has been taken from them” because they lost their pipeline jobs. Mind you, the Keystone pipeline might have created three dozen permanent jobs across the entire nation. Some welders and pipefitters lost the opportunity for temporary employment on a specific project, but they didn’t lose actual jobs because the permits that were granted and quickly revoked never took effect. If you lose your dignity because you didn’t get a job that never existed, it seems to me you’re looking for an excuse to explain your meth addiction.

So put the red meat aside and what have you got? Joe is tracking an elk that was injured in a car accident. He finds a building with noisy air conditioning in the middle of winter, which strikes him as odd. Then he finds a dead body hanging out of a window in the building. The dead guy is a professor at Wyoming’s only university. Joe later learns that the professor is suspected of being a Chinese spy (because he’s Chinese) despite the utter absence of anything worth spying on in Wyoming, much less at a public university where academic projects aren’t national secrets. The building that puzzles Joe houses computers that are engaged in cryptocurrency mining. Joe also chases snowmobilers who are harassing elk in the hope that their antlers will fall off in advance of the season when it is legal to collect fallen antlers. The snowmobilers have something to do with the dead professor. All of this relates to dual threats to the current Republican governor’s upcoming reelection campaign: one by a fringe group of far right snowmobiling meth addicts and the second by the former Democratic governor, who has a distaste for the current governor’s coziness with the Chinese Communist Party.

The key villain, a paranoid nutcase named Jason Demo, believes that real Americans own guns, go to church, drive a pickup, and shop at Walmart. He’s confident that elites (meaning people who don’t drive pickups, shop at Walmart, etc.) have declared war on the West, the West being where real Americans live, except for the ones on the West Coast and those who don’t drive pickups, shop at Walmart, etc. Demo rants about high unemployment (apparently he doesn’t read the news) and complains that there isn’t enough mining and oil drilling on federal land (again, a belief not driven by actual facts). He believes that environmental concerns keep us from being energy independent, a point of view that’s pretty funny, given the number of times this series has lectured about the evils of wind energy. Demo is ready to make a stand via insurgency, apparently failing to notice how well the last insurgency went. That happens when you don’t read the news.

This isn’t a bad story if you don't take the red meat seriously, including the notion that “rogue” FBI agents created an extremist group so they could arrest domestic terrorists of their own invention. Yeah, whatever. And if you ignore the governor’s collusion with the Chinese. He might have had something to do with the spy balloon over Montana, although the book was written before the balloon was detected. The story moves quickly and I thought it was entertaining, perhaps because it is so farcical.

As usual, Joe doesn’t do much of anything, apart from getting stuck in the snow and fretting that a boy (even a churchgoing boy who wears the correct western gear) might get into his daughter’s jeans. There’s not much chance of that happening. Nate and his friend Geronimo take care of the necessary killing so that Joe can keep his hands clean. The novel proves again that the person with the biggest gun wins (Nate is proud of having one of the world’s biggest handguns, while Geronimo has a shotgun with not one, not two, but three barrels).

In its early days, before C.J. Box made such an obvious attempt to appeal to a far right readership by giving a voice to their silly grievances, the Joe Pickett series was much better. While Box has never been much of a prose stylist, he does capture the beauty that Wyoming residents find its their desolate environment. Box’s best work is the apolitical Blue Heaven, a novel that proves Box can mine the setting of unpopulated western states for good atmosphere and craft sound plots if he stays away from politics. 

The Pickett novels have always characterized environmentalists as extremists, so I am heartened by the half-hearted effort to recognize that people on the far right take extreme and dangerous action, even if they must be goaded to do so by rogue FBI agents. Box is careful not to make Pickett the voice of extremism, which is this novel’s saving grace. Still, I get the sense that Box is trying to straddle a line by appealing to an audience with politically extreme views without expressly endorsing them.

There is barely enough good storytelling in Storm Watch to overcome the neutral presentation of far right talking points, but the novel advances too many unchallenged lies for me to recommend it without reservations. I suppose this would be a good book for fact-challenged readers who might enjoy chewing a healthy serving of red meat, but it’s also a good read for rational readers who enjoy laughing at far right fantasies.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

The Disappeared by C.J. Box

Published by G.P. Putnam's Sons on March 27, 2018

Much like the current president, the new governor in Joe Pickett’s Wyoming is a wealthy Republican who doesn’t pay his bills and tries to sell himself as one of the common folk. Joe famously conducted investigations for the former governor, so the new governor decides to give him a try. A British CEO named Kate disappeared in Saratoga, Wyoming, and for reasons that have something to do with budget cuts and passive-aggressive bureaucrats, local law enforcement officers are dragging their spurs instead of finding her. The new governor wants Joe to track down the missing woman because the governor cares about getting bad press in British tabloids.

Kate was last seen at an expensive resort where (oh happy coincidence!) Joe’s youngest daughter Sheridan happens to be working. Nate Romanowski shows up to cause the kind of mayhem that soft-talking Joe doesn’t want to cause himself. As usual, Romanowski points his extra-large gun at everyone he meets and has to talk himself out of shooting them, unless he doesn’t. He commits a murder in just about every novel (this one included) while his law-and-order buddy Joe Pickett looks the other way. It is impossible to believe that someone as resolutely virtuous as Joe would befriend, much less enable, the psychopathic Romanowski. The hypocrisy of ticketing the governor for not having a fishing license (we hear about that in every novel) while letting Romanowski get away with all sorts of violent crimes is hard to swallow.

A subplot involves an industrial burner in which unauthorized and mysterious burning is taking place. Another subplot involves Joe’s reaction to Sheridan’s new boyfriend. I’ve learned to shake my head and ignore Joe’s antiquated notions about appropriate human behavior. There’s only one kind of “real man,” the shy but resolute cowboy who says “shucks,” rarely says more than “yup” or “nope,” and shows no hint of being a metrosexual. In other words, real men don’t have a personality. However, real men wear Carhartt coats, a brand name that appears so many times in The Disappeared I’m wondering whether C.J. Box got paid a product placement fee every time he mentioned it. Box even includes a discussion of how to dress like a real cowboy (hint: wear Carhartt). In any event, I’ve always admired Joe Pickett novels for Box’s storytelling skills more than for Joe, who is a stalwart but lackluster character, despite his choice of clothing.

As he did in Cold Wind, Box has his characters sermonize about the evils of wind energy, falsely claiming that it is more expensive than traditional fossil fuel energy while ignoring the benefits of a clean, renewable energy source. His characters are also upset that the wind-generated electricity is transmitted to California, which automatically makes it bad because California is full of metrosexuals. Box acknowledges that wind energy brings jobs to Wyoming, but one of his characters laments that wind energy cost him his job as a coal miner (clearly not true). Box ignores the fact that Wyoming coal is mined to provide power in other states. If it isn’t bad to transport Wyoming’s coal out of Wyoming, what’s wrong with transporting energy from Wyoming’s wind to other states? As anyone who has been to Wyoming knows, the state has wind to spare.

It is a legitimate concern that wind turbines kill birds (which angers Romanowski and his falconer friends), but coal mines kill people and fossil fuels cause global warming that is killing the planet. Life is full of tradeoffs. Wind energy isn’t perfect, but no energy source is. Still, don’t expect to find a balanced discussion of energy or environmental policy in Box’s books.

In addition to his disdain for clean energy, Box reprises another disappointing element of Cold Wind in The Disappeared, one that will apparently play an even stronger role in the next novel. For fear of spoiling what might be a surprise, I won’t mention it, but I will say that Cold Wind is Box’s worst novel, and he does his readers no favors by rehashing its worst plot elements in The Disappeared.

Fortunately, The Disappeared is a slightly better novel, in part because Box avoids the howlingly silly events that makes Cold Wind so utterly unbelievable. The part of the story that involves the missing Kate is interesting and credible, although it lacks suspense. Romanowski isn’t in enough scenes to ruin the book, and I can’t hold it against Box for ascribing ill-informed opinions about wind energy to his characters, given how many people have a distorted view of clean energy (presumably because they are spoon-fed their opinions by Fox News). However, the part of the story that involves mysterious activities at the burner is intended solely to advance Box’s political views by demonizing the people he disagrees with, and I regarded that as a cheap shot.

The novel’s ending is a cliffhanger setup for the next novel. I’m not sure I’ll bother to read it, as the Joe Pickett series seems to have passed its shelf life.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Vicious Circle by C.J. Box

Published by G.P. Putnam's Sons on March 21, 2017

Vicious Circle is the latest entry in a series that has grown tired. Readers who want to read what is essentially the same story over and over will enjoy it. Readers who hope to find something fresh in a stale series will probably be disappointed.

Dave Farkus calls Joe Pickett and leaves a message to tell him he overheard a conversation that Dallas Cates was having about Joe’s family. He doesn’t reveal the contents of the conversation and he disappears on a hunting trip before Joe can talk to him. Joe takes a break from hunting for a poaching ring to hunt for Farkus. It turns out that other people are also hunting for Farkus. They find him first.

Joe is worried because Dallas Cates had an unpleasant relationship with his daughter Alice. C.J. Box tells us that Dallas served two-to-four years in a penitentiary for a misdemeanor hunting violation, which isn’t possible, but this isn’t the first time Box has been mistaken about Wyoming law. Later, Joe is pleased that he obtained a “clean” statement from a woman in custody because she “didn’t ask for a lawyer,” but seems to be unaware that her statement can’t be used against her because he didn’t give her a Miranda warning. For a law enforcement officer, Joe knows shockingly little about the law.

Marcus Hand (clearly modeled after Wyoming lawyer Gerry Spence) returns in Vicious Circle, having married Joe’s mother-in-law, who also returns. Nate Romanowski is back, conveniently stumbling across the dead body of a woman who is tied into the Dallas Cates story. Nate ruminates about how he misses killing people who (in Nate’s judgment, as opposed to that of, for instance, a jury) deserve to be killed. He almost kills someone based on a three-second snatch of a conversation he overhears, which suggests that Nate’s judgment is questionable at best. Box occasionally assures the reader that Romanowski isn’t a “cold-blooded killer” but that’s exactly what he is.

Why Joe is so fond of this vigilante, who stands for all the lawlessness that Joe supposedly hates, is beyond me. At one point in the novel, Nate cuts off someone’s ears. Joe, who is such a model law enforcement officer that he once ticketed the governor for fishing without a license (as we are reminded in every novel), doesn’t arrest his friend Nate for this act of mayhem. At the end of the book, he even decides not to enforce one of the hunting laws he’s charged with enforcing. Good for him, but Joe’s situational law enforcement should be troubling to readers who admire his sanctimonious “by the book” attitude. Are readers not troubled by Joe’s hypocrisy?

I will say that Vicious Circle takes a more balanced view of the criminal justice system than some other books in the series (perhaps Box has been influenced by Gerry Spence?). The book acknowledges that too many police officers view criminal defense attorneys as the enemy and that too many cops plant evidence or engage in other misconduct to improve the state’s odds of convicting the people they perceive as bad guys. I’m glad Box made that point, but that's not enough to make the novel worth a reader's time.

The contrived plot is familiar and predictable. Joe’s family is threatened, again. Joe and Nate face peril, again. The story flows smoothly and makes for the unchallenging reading experience that Box fans seem to appreciate, but it never generates the kind of tension that a thriller should create. It’s actually kind of dull, as is Joe. It’s a shame Box hasn't done anything to breathe some life into this series.

NOT RECOMMENDED

Force of Nature by C.J. Box

Published by Putnam on March 20, 2012

Force of Nature is much better than the last Joe Pickett novel, which was so full of plot holes that it made for an awfully bumpy ride.  Force of Nature focuses on Nate Romanowski, who is finally facing a showdown with rogue elements of “The Five,” a group of Special Forces operatives to which Romanowski once belonged.  Their leader, a megalomaniac named Nemecek, wants to take Romanowski out.  To that end, Nemecek recruits three amateur assassins who approach Romanowski in a boat.  Pickett becomes involved when a fisherman discovers a boat full of corpses.  With the sheriff he despises nipping at his heals, Pickett finds himself facing the uncomfortable choice of pursuing or helping his buddy Romanowski.

Romanowski is a falconer and so is Nemecek.  C.J. Box appears to have done meticulous research into the art of falconry.  His descriptions of a falconer’s mindset are convincing.  The symbolic parallel between the falcon that hunts other birds and the dangerous man who hunts Romanowski might be a bit obvious but it’s nonetheless an effective device for telling the story.  Romanowski’s relationship with falcons and the role they play in his connection with Nemecek is the most interesting part of the novel.

Pickett appeals to readers because (in Romanowski’s words) Pickett is “straight and upright and burdened with ethics, responsibility, and a sense of duty.”  Romanowski also has a sense of ethics, but “straight and upright” he is not.  Romanowski has a sort of spirituality -- he tells us that he is of the Earth, not walking upon it -- and pursues falconry to get closer to “the primitive world.”  Romanowski is unquestionably primitive.  He keeps a braid of his dead lover’s hair dangling from his gun -- which is strange, but Romanowski is a strange dude, machismo on steroids.  That makes him (in this novel, at least) an interesting character, although Box sometimes takes him a bit over the top.

By contrast, when Box writes about Pickett, the reader is treated to a strong, silent man.  When he doesn’t know what to say (which is often), he looks down at his boots.  The boot gazing wears a bit thin after a few novels.  At least Romanowksi forces Pickett out of the rather dull (from a reader’s perspective) black-and-white world in which he prefers to dwell.  Romanowski doesn’t worry much about hunting season or game permits as he kills his evening meal, the kind of attitude that Pickett, in his role as game warden, frowns upon, but Pickett gives his friend Romanowski a pass for his many transgressions (revenge killing among them).  Pickett’s discomfort -- his attempt to have it both ways by refusing to listen when Romanowski wants to confess his sins -- exposes his willingness to engage in situational ethics when it comes to friendship and thus humanizes him.

As is so often true in thrilerworld, the story suffers from credibility issues.  It feeds upon the popular paranoid delusion that the government has the ability to intercept and erase all digital communications (including emails and website postings) that mention a particular subject or person.  Romanowski should know better.  It’s also hard to accept that a trained operative like Romanowski would be wedded to the belief that “torture works” when most serious students of interrogation agree that torture produces inaccurate information.  Romanowski even makes a bizarre speech about the “savagery in the streets” America would experience if not for the underappreciated tough guys who torture the evildoers in faraway lands.  Finally, I didn’t believe for a moment the romance that develops late in the story.  On the other hand, Romanowski’s dark secret, when finally revealed, is believable if anti-climactic, although his explanation for failing to blow the whistle on Nemecek makes little sense.

Credibility problems aside, Force of Nature tells an enjoyable story.  The action scenes are fun, the pace is swift, and the parallel plotlines come together nicely in the end (with, of course, the obligatory but unusually clever shoot-out).

RECOMMENDED