Review: Shadows Reel: A Joe Picket Novel by C. J. Box

Shadows Reel: A Joe Picket Novel by C. J. Box begins the day before Thanksgiving. It has been a few weeks since recent events (Dark Sky: A Joe Pickett Novel) and Wyoming Game Warden Joe Pickett is still recovering though he is back to work. He is feeling the aches and pains as his body continues to heal as well as his age, but is glad to be out in the field and doing his job. back at work He is looking forward to Thanksgiving and all the company which will include Liv Romanowski and her baby daughter, Kestrel, as Nate Romanowski is away and on the trail of the violent outlaw falconer, Axel Soledad. That hunt and Nate’s POV becomes one of the three storylines in the read and is slowly revealed.  

But, at this point, that is all in the future as Pickett and his dog, Daisy, head to business at hand. The destination is the Crazy Z-Bar Ranch, where owner Lorne Trumley has reported a dead moose on his property. The hunting season for moose ended a couple weeks ago so this is a problem.

It soon becomes clear that a far bigger problem is going on than a dead moose when he arrives in the general area. Something smells like burned pork. Ravens are on top of the dark mound which is still smoldering in spots as evidenced by the smoke/steam coming upwards on this chilly morning. Pickett grabs his binoculars and looks at the mound and suddenly everything is much clearer.

It is a body.

A body means investigation by the recently elected Scott Tibbs. It also means that Sheriff Tibbs is not a fan of Joke Pickett and does not appreciate the fact that Joe Picket has created a mess that has to be dealt with at Thanksgiving. As if Joe Pickett scheduled and planned the events. Tibbs does not want Pickett anywhere around, but of course Pickett is going to keep his nose in the investigation as that is what he does.

He is not alone in that as his wife MaryBeth tends to do the same thing with matters that his close to home. These days she is now the director of the library and often comes to work before everyone else. Pulling into her space at the library before dawn that same morning that soon saw her husband looking at a smoldering dead body, she had witnessed somebody leaving a package at the door of the building. The drop-off by the shadowy figure was spooky as was the way the package appeared. It is only after she takes some pictures of it and then unwraps the package does she realize that it is some sort of detailed leatherbound photo album that dates back to the 1930s. It documents a year in the life of a Nazi government official by the name Julius Streicher. It is a legacy of nightmarish history.

It is also a book that some will kill for as Mary Beth, Joe Pickett, and family and friends soon learn. They want it back and don’t care what they have to do to get it.

Nate’s hunt for the violent outlaw falconer, MaryBeth’s album, and the discovery of the body by Joe Pickett, are the three plot lines that are the storytelling pillars of Shadows Reel: A Joe Pickett Novel by C. J. Box. As befitting a book in a well-established series, there is not really any character development here. Much of the read is from the perspective of Mary Beth as she researches the book and comes to grips with the horrors it represents as well as the current threat that exists. Because of that situation as well as the hunt by Nate, much of this book has Joe Pickett regulated to the sidelines. This reader prefers reads where he is front and center and not so much on the periphery of various things. Still, while not the best work in the series, this reader enjoyed the complicated tale.

 

 

My reading copy came from the Dallas Public Library System by way of the OverDrive eBook app.

 

Kevin R. Tipple ©2022