C.J. Box’s nineteenth Joe Pickett adventure is out now! Read on for reviews and more:
WOLF PACK sees Joe Pickett teaming up with Katelyn Hamm, a female game warden based on one of Wyoming’s few real-life woman wardens, to discover who’s behind a series of drone killings. CrimeReads interviews C.J. Box here about the environmental and technological issues that face the American West and inspire his books:
“I start each book with a contemporary theme or controversy and add elements that propel the story. Often, several storylines interest me at once and I try to figure out how to weave them into the novel. I love doing research on topics that interest me and connections seem to get made while I do that.”
And The Real Book Spy’s “Five Questions” feature delves into the challenges and rewards of keeping a long-running series surprising and fresh:
Wolf Pack had the feel to me from the first pages as a kind of watershed book where Joe Pickett’s life would be shaken up. I think that’s a good thing to happen in a series so readers will never know who will make it and who won’t…I never think past the book I’m writing when I’m writing it. I think readers can sense it when an author is holding things back for future books down the road.
Reviewers are full of praise for Box’s latest:
– Publishers Weekly, in a starred review, calls the final showdown one of “…Joe and Nate’s best and bloodiest confrontations. Box is the king of contemporary crime fiction set in the West.”
– Kirkus says it’s “one of his most tightly wound tales, with more thrills than a snowy road on a steep mountain and more authority than the governor of Wyoming.”
– The Providence Journal declares, “This 19th postmodern Western to present Pickett as a lawman cut from the classic cloth is a thriller of rare depth and emotion, featuring pitch perfect plotting and characterizations every bit the equal of Cormac McCarthy and Larry McMurtry.”
– Booklist praises WOLF PACK’s combination of fan favorite characters and new threats: “As always, Box takes familiar elements of his long-running series—the upstanding Joe, the renegade Nate, a daughter in danger (this time it’s Lucy), and a threat from outside—and seamlessly combines them into a read that makes your heart race, even though you won’t leave the couch until you’ve turned the last page. Half mystery, half thriller, totally worthwhile.”
