A neighbor gave me this one, which he had gotten mail-order, so I am actually reading the very latest book in a series which hardly ever happens!
It starts right out with the hero of all the Box books, Joe Pickett, barely surviving an assassination attempt while out on his beat as a State of Wyoming Game Warden in the middle of nowhere.
p 12 lays out the scene of the crime:
It was on Antler Creek Road, which is a public road until it hits a three-way fork where Joe was shot.
I’m pretty sure this be the key to the whodunit part of the book, namely which fork was Joe gonna head down?
So here are the three forks:
- north – the road to Double Diamond Ranch, owned by a mega-rich easterner who we meet in Ch 5. A real jerk.
- middle – Bucholz Cattle Company
- south – Mc-Elwee Land and Cattle Ranch – two felonious sisters, also jerks.
We see all three places at least twice:
- Joe visits each place in one of the flashback chapters.
That’s where Box shows us that they are suspicious places. 🙂 - Then one of Joe’s three daughters (three daughters, three suspicious places … get it??) visits each place to get a feel for whether this is why Joe got shot.
Ch 3 The bad guys
p 21 Chapter 3 gives us an instant replay of the assassination attempt we just heard about. We meet Peddy, a big slob of hitman, and O’Brian, a little ferret-faced hitman. They have just done the deed, Peddy was the shooter.
- They hate each other, but it’s a job.
- The job we learn later was an ambush, they were on both sides of the road to get Joe in a crossfire.
- They stashed their stuff higher up the mountains, so when the deed was done they had to hustle back there, get their stuff and clear out!
- Up where their stuff is, they look back down and see a guy approaching Joe’s truck, far, far below. p 25
- Peddy takes a few shots at him but it’s too far and he misses.
- We are left to wonder if this is the guy who called it in, and why didn’t he stick around to say he was shot at.
Ch 4 At the hospital
Wyoming is so underpopulated that they have take Joe to Montana (Billings) for top-quality ICU care!
p 35 We meet April, the middle daughter, who conveniently is a private detective and happens to be in town with her boss, the formidable-seeming Cassie, who immediately solves the problem of “who knows what they’re doing around here??”.
Reading the liner notes, it looks like the arc of this book will be Joe’s wife and three dauthers will work together to catch the bad guys. With the introduction of Cassie, we have someone who knows how to run an investigaton.
Ch 5 Four weeks before, Joe visits the Double D
Four weeks earlier, Joe is in parked on the side of the mountain in his pick-up eating his breakfast of elk jerky and cashews (yum!). He is in high-alert mode because it is opening day of the general elk-hunting season. A BFD in this part of Wyoming. p 44
He is summoned to the Double Diamond to get lectured at by Michael Thompson, the rich easterner has made himself very powerful in local politics and wants to tell Joe how to vote on something..
The actual summoner is his old friend Clay, who he used to respect, before he became Thompson’s errand boy. The actual point seemed to be that Thompson wanted Joe to lean his way in future land-use hearings.
The sisters convene
Back in the current time, we meet all three sisters. They are Sheridan, April, and Lucy. They convene at the family home on the banks of the Twelve Sleep River, where none of them live anymore. There are a few pages of sisterly bickering until they get down to business. April says that mom thinks they should start with the Mc-Elwees since they are known to do shady stuff.
p 65
Sheridan says they should also look at the Bucholzs’. The McElwees are obviously creeps, but the Bucholzs’ are more passive-aggressive, sneaky-type creeps. And we;ve met the Double Diamond guy who is an overbearing super-rich guy. So now we’ve had an introduction to all three ranches and their individual brands of miscreants. p 66
Killers gonna kill
Looking for the guy they shot at and missed, Peddy and O’Brian cruise the sagebrush until they find a camper trailer with an elk hunter in it. Because he is a genius, Peddy decides this guy is the one at Joe’s trailer and kills him and burns the trailer. There’s your gratuitous violence! p 72
Peddy gets a call that Joe is NOT dead and they won’t be paid till he is. So now their tiny psychotic brains will be focused on going to the Billings hospital and finishing the job.
Meet the new sheriff of Twelve Sleep County
p 84 Little ole Twelve Sleep County has had trouble keeping a sheriff which I would know of I’d read the previous Box books. The new guy is a tall lanky fellow named Sondergard that the sisters think is kinda hot. I sense romance in the air, the only question is which sister?
p 94 Sheridan neets him, then gets in trouble immediately by getting caught searching her dad’s truck in the Impound garage. She’s arrested pretty roughly by a deputy – Bowkley – who is also brand new to the force and to the area.
My spidey-sense tells me that Bowkley is going to turn out to be a Bad Guy, not clear how yet.
Joe visits the Bucholz Ranch
p 107 Three weeks earlier, Joe took the middle road off Antler Creek Road to tangle with the Bucholz family. Their land sounds like heaven to me, but the people and the buildings are a mess. Everything is run-down and need paint. When he arrives, they are busy doing “cattle sorting” – where they decide which lucky cows are ready for the meat processing place, which go back to which pasture etc.
p 113 They don’t even have real cowboys helping, it’s a couple of known tweekers from the town’s official seedy bar’s parking lot. Even Joe knows about it and them.
There’s a mystery airplane flying over their “badlands”, and they get real squirrley when Joe asks about it.
The bad guys follow the girls
The genius dudes that shot Joe are so obvious in following the girls to Joe’s house that the girls are able to trap them a simple “truck in front, truck behind” maneuver. The killers have no choice but to actually talk to them since they are boxed in by pickup trucks. The conversation was pretty lame!
p 130
The hunter that DID saw it all comes in
Sheriff Sondergard actually DOES invite Sheridan to sit in on the interview with a guy who says he witnessed the shooting! Maybe because he’s into fair play, but MOSTLY because he wants to go out with her. Whatever works! 🙂
p 142 The guy turns out to be kind of cool!
He’s into something called “pure hunting”:
- No technology
- hunt with a bow and arrows,
- start your fire with a bow drill.
- It’s a Zen thing…
It seems highly irregular to let Sheridan sit in, but that’s what they do.
The fellow, Earl Wright, actually witnesses the bad guys hiding their truck and going to opposite sides of the road to ambush Joe.
When they shot at him this guy booked out of there to go for help.
Also, it wasn’t clear if this was the guy they shot at later…
p 146 It was all going so well until he mentioned the alien spaceship landing next to his camp. Now they don’t know whether to believe any of it!
Joe visits the McElwee Ranch
p 158 Two weeks before:
There are two McElwee sisters, Lisa and Lainie.
My tendency would be to cut them some slack they’re just two women running a ranch, but we learn quickly that they are serious gangsters!
The worst example: a state trooper was prepared to testify against them in a contraband case, but wasn’t able to because he and his lawyer were killed in a fatal accident on I-90. That’s pretty gangsta, right?
p 162 Joe is there because a hunter has reported shenanigans with a drugged-up bull elk (they have different problems up in Wyoming!).
The hotter sister hits on Joe so he won’t notice that the other sister is cleaning up evidence in the yard, but Joe ain’t falling for that!
p 174 On the way out he checks out a trailer hidden in the aspens. He gets dizzy! Probably related to the drugged elk. You experienced readers are probably thinking meth lab, but we don’t know that yet!
Peddy has a rough prformance review
p 178 Peddy and O’Brian meet their local contact on a remote road.
Surprise! That contact is Deputy Bowkley!!
So we were correct! He IS a bad one. After a conversation where Peddy reminds us all again what an unpleasant and basically incompetent person he is, Bowkley plants a couple of .22 slugs behind his ear.
Nobody’s gonna miss Peddy least of all his partner O’Brian.
The chapter ends kind of ominously with Bowkley and O’Brian heading off to Billings to finish off Joe … so O’Brian can collect his fee (which I guess just doubled since he partner is gone?!)
Lucy goes to the Double Diamond
p186 We spend a few pages on sisterly repartee and gettiing to know Lucy a little better. She’s the younger, new-agey one of the group. She doesn’t like guns and won’t take one with her.
p189 The rich guy who owns the DD is Michael Thompson. He has a pretty dark resume. Chinese Communist Party ties, a serial philander with the women under him (so to speak).
p 196 The security guy for the ranch flags her down, he’s an old friend of the family, and he probably convinced Thompson to talk to her. She meets the trophy wife, then meets the man himself!
It was a pretty edgy conversation! Lucy is the psychic one remember.
She thinks:
p 202 You are scrambling to stay out of prison at the moment! Maybe State, maybe Fed, but you’ll end up in one of them!
April gets to visit the McElwees
p 205 There is some weirdness off the road in the way there. There are three hispanic guys driving cattle OUT of a salt lick in the side of the mountain by shooting their pistols. This makes no sense, but we leave it for the moment and she proceeds on.
April has a nice flashback to high school, to a 6-3 “gender-fluid” fellow names Pablo whose dad was married to one of the sisters for a while. Not sore there was a point except to give background on how weird they are. p 209
Oh, there IS a connection! There’s a huge picture of Lisa McEllwee naked and hot in their living room, and it was painted by Pablo’s dad before he was kicked out!
p 217 Sister Lainie comes back and is pissed of about blabbing to April. The fully-armed hispanic guys come back and it gets tense, but April gets out.
Sheridan visits the Bucholz Cattle Company
Sheridan is approaching the Buchoz ranch, she pulls off the road and watches three drilling trucks go by.
She gets it into her head to somehow come into the ranch from the back way to avoid the trucks. p 225
She’s the intuitive one that gets “feelings” remember…
p 228 She does this … navigating up creek beds in 4-WD and such until she comes on a set of derelict cabins … one of which is not so derelict!
There’s a “tall, gaunt man” with an electronic collar and who is chained to the floor.
It gets a little weird for a minute, but she uses her trusty pepper spray to escape.
How’s everybody doing?
- p 241 Marybeth gets a good report on Joe – yay!
- p 244 She reports back to the girls.
- p 246 Each girl takes a quick shot at why her ranch is the guilty one!
- p 248 Bowkley and O’Brian are driving to Billings
- p 257 Bowkley gratuitiously kills a guy on the Crow Reservatoin to test the odd contraption theit unnamed boss gave then to kill Joe with a fentanyl overdose.
- p 259 The sisters and the sheriff have a big pow-wow to discuss their candidates for Joe’s attempted murder.
- p 261 Lucy say’s it’s the really rich guy. The sheriff is not too impressed.
- p 263 April has the McElwees. The sheriff agrees they’re bad, but the feds want to sit on them. The sheriff’s stock goes WAY down in the room.
- Sheridan reports on weird Uncle Hank in his electric collar. Sheriff still thinks they’re “nice folks”. He ain’t dating Sheridan any time soon.
Meanwhile, back at the hospital
p 270 Joe’s been in a two person room. The nurse notices that his vitals monitor is out, she stalks out, and the easiest fix turns out to be to move Joe to a new room.
p 271 We’re taking a quick time out for a line I thought was hilarious, and which I frankly didn’t know CJ Box had in him:
The roommate is in a coma from a car accident, but every now and then wakes up ans says something lewd to Marybeth, for example: “Hey sweetheart, why don’t you come over here and sit on my face?“
I did not see that coming! I was picturing Marybeth all wrong it seems! 🙂
p 272 Back to the story. MB falls asleep in Joe’s new room, then is awakened by a commotion later. The face-sitting guy suddenly dies from a weird seizure. Joe has dodged the bullet yet again!
Flashback to Joe two days before
There’s a blizzard, he catches up on his email. He’s gotta write letters to all three of the suspected ranches:
- p 277 Even Joe is catching on the the drugged out moose might be fentanyl related.
- p279 There’s a very interesting digressing on the changing fentanyl market.
- We have a (Trump-induced?) cold war with China, so now it’s easier to ship the ingredienst and make it here.
- There are appaerntly thousands of “militry age” young Chinesemen infiltrated onto the country. Who knew?!
- p 287 Joe goes to the airport and learns what the helicopter with the weird extension was about.
- It turns out it’s right there in a hangar and he gtes to look at it.
- p 291 There’s 40 pages left in the book, it looks like this last flashback is where we’re be given all the pieces.
- p 293 We are still in the blizzard, and Joe visits the local coffee shop with the crew of older women that know everything about everybody hang out.
- Mostly they rehash the bad traits of each ranch.
Joe wakes up! (spoiler, all is revealed)
The book is almost over, time to reveal a few things to wrap things up!
- Where was Joe headed the morning he was shot?
- To the Bucholz Ranch to ask about the old guy locked in a cabin.
- The girls are at Joe’s house burning up the internet researching all the stuff they’ve learned.
- There’s a lot of noise about fentanyl and such, but the big news is a very large and very profitable vein of rare earth mminerals at the edge of the Bucholz property.
- At the same time, the bad guys, Bowkley and O’Brian are driving back from (they think) killing Joe, and Bowkley tells O’Brian he’s got to kill all three girls tonight also.
O’Brian does get into the house and even into Sheridan’s room, but Lucy blows him away with a handgun. Nice touch that is was new-agey Lucy, the one that hates guns.
Their buddy Nate was watching over them from outside, and does some pretty serious damage to Bowkley to get him to rat out Bucholz as the mastermind bad guy.
That’s the book! I really enjoyed it! I did not have a strong impression of the Box books from the one I read back in Reno, but I will be working my way through them after this!