Nowhere to Run

Author: C.J. Box

"Box's series is the gold standard," wrote Library Journal about Below Zero, but never has he written a novel as harrowing as Nowhere to Run.

Joe Pickett's in his last week as the temporary game warden in the town of Baggs, Wyoming, but there have been strange things going on in the mountains, and his conscience won't let him leave without checking them out: reports of camps looted, tents slashed, elk butchered. And then there's the runner who simply vanished one day. Joe doesn't mind admitting that the farther he rides, the more he wishes he could just turn around and go home. And he is right to be concerned. Because what awaits him is like nothing he's ever dealt with, like something out of an old story, except this is all too real and too deadly. When he'd first saddled up, he'd thought of this as his last patrol. What he hadn't known was just how accurate that thought might turn out to be.

Nowhere To Run (Joe Pickett, #10)

Publishers Weekly (starred review):

Edgar-winner Box's outstanding 10th Joe Pickett novel (after Below Zero) takes Pickett into darker territory than ever before. Pickett's eerie last patrol as a temporary game warden in a remote mountainous area turns into a savage brush with death, followed by a crisis of conscience that drives the decent Pickett back into the same mountains to rescue Diane Shober, an Olympic runner who vanished there — and to bring Caleb and Camish Grim, twin brothers suspected of poaching (and maybe worse), to justice. Box inexorably builds Joe's harrowing personal quest into a complex meditation on human greed and government corruption. A lone black wolf, possibly Box's symbol for the wilderness within and without the human soul, tracks Joe throughout this terrible, beautiful tale of courage and compassion and culpability.

 

Library Journal (starred review):

Box's latest thriller (after Below Zero) is an intense story of multiple crimes that asks rhetorically how much government interference is mandatory when people just want to be left alone. Echoing themes from earlier books (Winterkill), Box views the quandary from all sides in this well-structured novel.

 

Booklist (starred review):

Nowhere to Run, the tenth in the series, ranks with his best books, such as Open Season (2001) and Out of Range (2005). Readers should take note of their surroundings before opening this book: once they start reading, they won’t know what hit them.

 

Kirkus Reviews (starred review):

It’s great to see the usual Box strengths -- exhilarating landscapes, high adventure, thrilling suspense, surprising moral quandaries -- done to a turn.

 

BookPage:

C.J. Box has won about every award there is to win: the Edgar, the Macavity, the Anthony, the Gumshoe, the Barry -- and with good reason. Like Tony Hillerman before him, he has reinvented a genre and made it his own.

 

Billings Gazette:

Box's familiarity with Wyoming's outdoors plays out strongly, as nature again becomes its own character -- with landscape as much to battle as to admire.