A great first paragraph: “On the third day of their honeymoon, infamous environmental activist Stewie Woods and his new bride, Annabel Bellotti, were spiking trees in the forest when a cow exploded and blew them up. Until then, their marriage had been happy.” This is the second in the 11-book series about Game Warden Joe Pickett. Once again, Box sets the leftist environmentalists against the radically conservative ranchers. In one confrontation, John Coble frames the viewpoint of the ranchers to Stewie, “You people want to stop us from doing everything we know. You do it just so that if you ever want to travel out here from the East in your new car, you might be able to see a wolf out the window. You’re trying to make our home a real-life theme park for environmental whackos. You don’t give a shit how many people lose their jobs or are displaced – just so you can see a goddamn wolf that hasn’t lived here in over a hundred years.” In this story, the ranchers try to take back what the environmentalists have gained by hiring a hit man, a stock detective, to hunt down and kill their adversaries. Savage Run is a beautiful impossibly rugged canyon in the wilderness that historically played an important role in one Indian band escaping from another, and it plays a critical role in this story as Pickett and others are being chased by Charlie Tibbs and Coble. Box uses good, strong characters, even if the bit about blowing up a cow is far-fetched. This is good airplane/vacation material, and I’ll read the next Pickett novel.
I listened to this Joe Pickett book again, in audiobook format, 12 years later in 2023. Just as I described above in 2011, I found it equally engaging, equally well-written. Box's ability to poetically describe the Wyoming wilderness is often times breathtaking. I'll be forever grateful to my cousin, Midwest Dave, for letting us know about this series of books.
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