Open Season (2001)

Very well written mystery. Makes me re-appreciate the Wyoming landscape. Can't wait to read all of his other books@ ( )

This is the first book in another series that I've heard about for years but haven't gotten around to reading until now - sure glad that that people on DorothyL keep talking about these great series so that eventually I work my way toward them.

Joe Pickett is a Warden for the Game, Fish and Parks in Wyoming. He is relatively new at the job and does make a few mistakes (makes him normal in my view). He has a wife, two daughters and a child on the way.

Things start getting strange when an outfitter rides his horse into Joe's yard and dies. He was shot twice in the chest and was carrying a gun and a cooler. Joe helps find out what everyone thinks happened but he isn't sure that they have the right answers. What he finds out in the end endangers his life and the lives of his family.

Well written, great characters and a good story. I saw a review that said that the oldest daughter was one of the best depictions of a little girl written and I agree, she is smart but still a kid which is how it should be.

I'll be reading more in this series. ( )

An enjoyable read, which is a little slow to get going in the opening chapters as it establishes the strong and realistic characters of Joe Pickett and his family. Unfortunately most of the other characters resemble the standard genre types. The mystery elements don't really work as there are too few characters and little in the way of red herrings. Where the book does work is in taking the reader through Joe's experiences as he gets sucked deeper into the case and begins to unravel the motives behind the events he has witnessed. The pace picks up in the last third as Joe closes in on the truth and there is a satisfying finale. ( )

It is possible I might have enjoyed this book more if I had not read it such a short time after James Lee Burke’s The Glass Rainbow; but with Burke - his vivid. intense prose style, the vividness of his characters and the moral bleakness of the world they navigate - fresh in mind, C.J. Box’ first novel fell decided short for me.

It does have an interesting premise, though - set in a rural area of the United States (and thus, although it is Wyoming rather than Louisiana, again inviting comparison to Burke), it features what certainly must be one of the more interesting protagonists in US crime fiction. Not just because of his profession (he is a game warden) but because Joe Pickett is such a thoroughly average guy – he is married with two kids, would much prefer being left in peace to having to hunt criminals, is frustrated because his job is paying barely enough to make a decent living, generally worries a lot - and not without reason, as he has a proven knack for messing things up spectacularly.

Joe Pickett is a very likeable protagonist (maybe even a bit too much so to feel entirely true) and his very averageness makes him stand out among fictional detectives. But while its hero is Open Season‘s biggest asset, he is also in a way its greatest problem. It is almost as if his character was bleeding through and affecting every other aspect of the novel – the language is bland, his nature descriptions (again, a huge contrast to Burke) unimaginative, his secondary characters cardboard, and the mystery stops being mysterious at about a quarter into the novel. In short, Open Season, while not exactly horrible, ends up being a decidedly mediocre novel, and for the most part I found it rather a slog to get through. Tension does mount a bit in the finale, but that was too few too late, and did not make much of a dent into the overall impression of boredom.

Joe Pickett series - western hunting, conservation etc.