Winterkill

This was a very good book. It’s apparently only the third in the series, and there’s no doubt I’ll read more. Winterkill is the term used for the number of elk that die during the winter season, mostly from starvation and the bitter cold. Game Warden Joe Pickett, from Twelve Sleep County, Wyoming, was out checking on the herd when, from a great distance, he saw his Forest Service supervisor, Lamar Gardiner, simply start shooting an entire herd of elk. Even though it was hunting season, the limit was only one animal. Joe, who had once arrested the governor for fishing without a license, began pursuing his supervisor with the intent of locking him up. By the time he got to him, the man was almost dead. He had been shot in the torso with two arrows which pinned his body against a tree. Before Joe could get him to a hospital, Gardiner died. It turns out there had been some unrest in the area over the Feds who ran half of the state via the Bureau of Land Management, and Gardner was a target for that unhappiness. Melinda Strickland was the new Forest Service official who had come to Wyoming to deal with the unrest, and she was focused on an odd lot of displaced people who had chosen a spot in the national forest to camp out. She was sure they were the source of that murder, and other problems. She was determined to evict them from the forest, a task Joe rightly thought was ridiculous, and he could not see the connection between the problems that Strickland claimed and the “sovereigns” who just wanted to be left alone. To complicate things, one of the sovereigns was the mother of April Keeley, the little girl who was abandoned about the same time Joe and his wife, Marybeth, lost a baby when Marybeth lost a baby because she was shot in the stomach while pregnant. It had been five years since that happened, and Joe and Marybeth had brought April into their home and loved her as if she was their own child, their third daughter. Now, Jeannie Keeley wanted her daughter back and the Picketts were not about to let that happen. Except, Jeannie gets a court order for custody of her daughter, and takes her to camp with the sovereigns. There’s one more very important character that fits into the story. Nate Romanowski is a mountain man, a former Special Forces guy, a guy who is totally tuned into his environment, a man who is the ultimate loner who has been living with little contact with other humans for many years. It was Nate who was first arrested for the murder of Gardiner. The clash of story lines takes the maniacal Strickland on a rampage against the sovereigns, setting up a possible Ruby Ridge/Waco scenario. Joe just wants to make sure his daughter is safe. C. J. Box is now in my power rotation of authors. Pickett is a great character and he is put in plot lines that are intense and very believable. This was a most entertaining read, one that I did not want to put down. I’ve already gotten the next one in the series, Nowhere to Run.