STORM WATCH (Joe Pickett #23) (audiobook) by C.J. Box

 










Published by Recorded Books in February of 2023.
Read by David Chandler.
Duration: 9 hours, 4 minutes.
Unabridged.

Synopsis:

Game Warden Joe Pickett is out in a snowstorm chasing down an elk with a broken leg. An out of state driver plowed into an elk herd while consulting the GPS app on his phone and an injured elk somehow limped away. 

Joe and his dog Daisy are on a big ranch owned by an out of state multi-millionaire trying to track down the elk to put it out of its misery. Joe finds the elk, an SUV from a different part of the state, a metal building that is very out of place in this out of the way valley, and a dead man. 

Joe starts to nose around and gets shot at twice by snowmobilers at the top of the valley and that's just the beginning of his troubles...

My review:

For the past 13 years I have been happily reviewing C.J. Box's novels. I went back and looked at those reviews and bit-time politics has been a part of them since almost the beginning. His early books featured eco-terrorists, an EPA ruling about water rights, wind turbines, and more. 

Warning: ***spoilers***

But lately, the books are just getting more and more over the top. There is a running commentary by the lazy sheriff in the last few books that Joe Pickett keeps finding trouble. In the last two books Joe found a man who had been burned to death by Hungarian Nazis. He found his old lady neighbor was killed by the same Nazis. In this book, he discovered a Chinese communist spy who had been killed by meth-heads (actually he discovered it twice because the body was moved). He discovered a dead meth addict, and was nearly assassinated (don't worry - the bad guy was killed.) Joe's friend and self-appointed body guard Nate Romanowski along with Geronimo Jones (Geronimo is Nate Romanowski's Nate Romanowski) kill 6 more men. That's a body count of over a dozen in a county in America's least populated state (576,000 people) in just a few months. In the book before that 5 or 6 people died as well! 18 people dead in this one county in less than a year!

It seems to me that this lazy sheriff has a really good point. In 2020, Wyoming only had 25 murders and that was up quite a bit from previous years. 

I love the Joe Pickett game warden stories with Joe being out in the wild doing game warden stuff. He has fought terrorists with a missile, Nazis, dirty FBI agents, Mexican drug cartel hit teams, uncovered a Chinese Communist plot, fought Antifa extremists (extreme even for Antifa), and found body after body after body. There's a point where it gets to be too much. Who else can you take down after you have taken down Nazis, Communists, and the FBI?

***End Spoilers***

All of the griping being said, the book does move along quite well and, if you have read all of the books, is full of a lot of satisfying moments. 

This book wraps up so many loose ends that it may very well be close to the end of the Joe Pickett series. There are hints of another set of adventures with his daughter or Geronimo Jones or even with a Wyoming state trooper. 

I rate this book 3 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: STORM WATCH (Joe Pickett #23) by C.J. Box.

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