Cold Wind by C.J. Box

Published by Putnam on March 22, 2011

Cold Wind gets off to a promising start as Joe Pickett discovers the body of his mother-in-law's most recent husband chained to the spinning blade of a wind-powered turbine. The plot begins to deteriorate when his mother-in-law, Missy, is arrested for the crime, the murder weapon having been found in the back of her car. The prosecutor, although allegedly a bright woman, believes she has a strong case because one of her ex-husbands claims that she tried to hire him to kill her husband. It apparently never occurs to the prosecutor to wonder (1) how she is going to prove that an elderly woman managed to climb a turbine tower and chain a dead body to a spinning blade, (2) how she will convince the jury that Missy would even want to display his body that way, or (3) why a jury would view the unsubstantiated story told by an embittered ex-husband as credible. The prosecutor seems to be counting on the jury to convict Missy because they resent her wealth and arrogance, but that attitude is inconsistent with what Pickett tells us about her professionalism.

A second storyline is just silly. Joe's buddy Nate Romanowski is living in a cave, hiding from five former members of a "rogue branch" of Special Forces who now work for Homeland Security. An attempt is made on his life, not by the rogues, but by a woman who hires two nitwits to shoot at his cave with a rocket launcher. How the woman acquired the weapon never seems to concern the nitwits and apparently it isn't supposed to concern the reader either, since the explanation eventually provided is laughable. That storyline turns into a fairly pedestrian tale of vigilante justice.

Few of the characters in Cold Wind have enough brain cells to rub together to produce a spark of intelligence. Only Missy's lawyer, Marcus Hand (clearly modeled after Gerry Spence, right down to the description of his hair and attire and the location and nature of his law practice) has any personality, but he is oddly ignorant of criminal procedure (making no protest, for instance, when a Justice of the Peace bases an adverse decision largely on the fact that Missy shops out-of-state instead of buying goods from the JP's feed store). Just as ignorant is the prosecutor, who repeatedly claims it would be "inappropriate" for her to listen to Pickett, a law enforcement officer who has information that might cast doubt on Missy's guilt, when in fact it is her ethical duty to do so. Box's fanciful description of legal proceedings (there are more howlers than those I've described) makes it impossible to take the novel seriously.

On the positive side, the story proceeds at a brisk pace, slowed only by occasional lectures on wind-generated energy that are meant to educate Pickett. Box's writing style is competent: not stirring but not awful. Pickett stumbles upon a crime that, while not terribly relevant to the plot, is inventive (I don't think it would work in the real world, but at least it's interesting). The ending contains a twist that saves it from being as anti-climactic as it initially appeared to be, although the twist was a bit predictable. Overall, Box did enough things right to keep me reading to the end, but not enough to make me encourage others to buy the novel.

A final warning: Some of the characters engage in a fair amount of pontificating about the evils of government support for wind energy. I don't care one way or another about opinions expressed by fictional characters (I don't pick up a thriller expecting to find an accurate, balanced view of energy policy) but some readers prefer their thrillers to remain entirely free of politics. Those readers might want to avoid this novel.

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