Life can be fleeting in the
mountains of Wyoming and Game Warden Joe Pickett knows that all too well.
Humans also have an amazing ability to be incredibly cruel. The most recent
example is scattered on the ground around him on an otherwise beautiful mid-March
day. Everywhere he looks he sees feathers, blood, shells, and the bodies of at
least 21 dead sage grouse. Nearby a few wounded survivors who will not last
much longer move around. Known to many as “Prairie Chickens” these helpless
birds were wiped out sometime very recently as they went about their springtime
rituals.
While Joe Pickett is plenty angry
about this senseless slaughter he is about to get much angrier when his friend
and Sheriff of Twelve Sleep County, Mike Reed, calls him. One of his deputies
has found a young woman in a ditch by the side of an isolated road. The woman
has been severely beaten and is barely alive. She also might be Joe’s daughter,
April, who left home to travel the rodeo circuit with a local professional
rodeo cowboy by the name of Dallas Cates. Dallas was trouble and Joe knew it,
but he couldn’t prevent his 18 year old daughter from running off with the
dashing cowboy.
It soon becomes very clear that the badly
beaten woman in the ditch is April. She has endured serious blunt force trauma
and is barely alive. Even if she lives, which is in grave doubt, most likely
she has suffered irreversible brain damage. As April fights for life, Joe
Pickett works to figure out what happened to his daughter and deal with whomever
is responsible.
 |
| Paperback--October 2015 |
As one expect in the series, a
significant portion of the book deals with a secondary storyline involving the
ongoing situation with Nate Romanowski. Repercussions from events detailed in Stone
Cold continue here and provide a significant backdrop to the main
storyline.
Endangered: A Joe Pickett Novel is the fifteenth book in the Joe Pickett series by author
C. J. Box and a mighty good one. Family and the complex relationship between
humans and nature have always been a major element in these books and such is
the case here. The same is true in the short story collection Shots
Fired. At the same time those issues never get in the way of the complex
mystery or mysteries contained in each book. If you are new to the series start
at the beginning with Open Season and work your way
forward as family history is a major part of this great series.
Endangered: A Joe Pickett Novel
C. J. Box
G. P. Putnam’s Sons (Penguin Group)
March 2015
ISBN# 978-0-399-16077-6
Hardback (also available in e-book
and audio)
384 Pages
$26.95
Material was obtained for my use in
an objective review from the good folks of the Plano Library System and specifically
the Haggard Branch.
Kevin R. Tipple © 2015
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