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WINTERKILL
by C.J. Box
G. P.Putnam's Sons, May 2003
323 pages
$24.95
ISBN: 0399150455


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

This is the third Joe Pickett mystery from C.J. Box; the first won the Edgar for best first novel. Joe is a Game Warden, responsible for a huge amount of land in Wisconsin. As the first blizzard of the season is approaching, Joe is watching a herd of elk when someone begins shooting them. It is close to the end of elk season, but no one is entitled to more than one and the shooter keeps hitting more and more. To his surprise he finds the supervisor of the Twelve Step National Forrest doing the shooting. Joe tries to take him in, but he gets away and in the snow someone slit his throat and then fired two arrows into him. Joe is determined to find out who did this.

At the same time the mother of Joešs foster daughter April returns to town with a group of ragtag survivalists and refugees from Waco and Ruby Ridge. April is still legally her daughter and she gets a judge to issue an order permitting her to take April. Several federal officials arrive in town and it looks like a showdown is developing between the Sovereigns and the keepers of the law. In the middle of a second blizzard Joe desperately stalks the murderer as well as hopes to rescue of his foster daughter.

Joe Pickett has become a very well-developed character over the three books. He is more competent than he was in the first book. He is devoted to his family and determined to do his job, even when others get in his way. His biggest advantage is that he will not quit until he has achieved what he set out to do. He may not be the brightest person around, but he knows the wilderness and he is dogged.

His wife is realistic also. The other characters seem less credible and the woman who commands the federal workers, Melissa Strickland, is completely unbelievable. She is all bad; there are no positive features to her character. This is also true for one of the FBI agents, Munker. The problem with this is that the conflict between Joe and the federal officials becomes completely black and white rather than complex and layered with many different possibilities. There was an opportunity to show the many-faceted problem of land usage and control and it would have made this a richer more enjoyable book. I think Box shortchanges his plot and his characters.

The sense of place is magnificent. It is easy to picture the valleys, the mountains, the blizzard, the forests. The reader becomes a part of the setting. Box knows this land and he knows how to use words to describe and develop it. The book is mostly well-written and well-plotted. It is more of a suspense novel than a mystery. The concern is whether the situation, combustible as it is, will burst into flame or not.

This was a good book that I enjoyed very much. I still feel, however, that by making the two main antagonists so black-and-white that Box missed the opportunity to give the reader some moral and ethical decisions to make, to understand the complicated complex relationship between those who use the land and those who manage it.

Reviewed by Sally A. Fellows, June 2003

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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