DWD's Reviews

Published in 2019 by Pamala Fagan Hutchins. Read by the author, Pamala Fagan Hutchins. Duration: 7 hours, 56 minutes. Unabridged. My synopsis: It is 1976 and E.R. Doctor Patrick Flint wants to take his family on a week-long family camping and hunting trip on horseback. He is keenly aware that his teen children are getting older and they won't have too many more opportunities to go on adventures around their Wyoming home. But, things are starting to unravel. His wife decides she doesn't want to go at the last minute. His daughter is complaining because she'll be out in the mountains and away from the boy she is interested in.  So, the family separates for the week and that's when things start to go bad - and once things start to go bad in this book they just don't stop. My review: The basic outlines of Switchback are quite good, especially for the first book in a series. There's a decent amount of world building and the choice to set the book in 1976 removes all...

  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 book...

  Published in 2022 by Recorded Books. Read by David Chandler. Duration: 9 hours, 4 minutes. Unabridged. Synopsis: Game Warden Joe Pickett investigates a report of a dead elk. Fearing that it is the victim of a botched attempt at poaching, he investigates. Instead, he finds a burned corpse and falls headlong into another murder investigation. Meanwhile, Joe's wife Marybeth, the director of the local library discovers an odd package left at the library with connections to a prominent Nazi from World War II. And...Nate Romanowski is in Denver hunting down an old enemy during the midst of an Antifa/BLM riot. My review: This is a book series about a game warden. Oftentimes, he is joined by a former special forces guy who is so into nature that he used to stand naked in a stream of water for hours at a time to get the feel of a river and its entire ecosystem - from the slime at the bottom to the fish to the birds that swoop down to the beavers that dam it up. Antifa protest in Denver Th...

  Published by Recorded Books in 2021. Read by David Chandler. Duration: 9 hours, 31 minutes. Unabridged. Winner of the Spur Award for Western Contemporary Novel (2022) Synopsis: Wyoming Game Warden Joe Pickett is good at his job and is known for dealing honestly with everyone. Usually, it's a good thing to have a great reputation. But, it can also mean that people dump the uncomfortable jobs on you because they know you will do them. The new Governor of Wyoming has an idea that will pick up his slumping poll numbers - he will convince a tech mogul to build his latest server farm in Wyoming. He hopes that the prestige and, more importantly, new high-paying jobs will help the voting public overlook his scandals when it comes time for re-election. The tech mogul is sort of a combination of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerburg. He has new skills he wants to master and the current skill he wants to master is providing himself with all of his own food. He gardens and hunts everything and he is...

  Published in 2020 by Recorded Books. Read by David Chandler. Duration: 10 hours, 35 minutes. Unabridged This book is the 20th in the Joe Pickett series, but in a lot of ways it is the sequel to the 19th book in the series: Wolf Pack . More about that below. The book starts out with Joe in the deep woods on an investigation of a bear attack. But, he is called back to Saddlestring, Wyoming on an emergency run. The wife of a legendary local judge was shot during a presumed attempted very long range sniper attack on the judge. The judge has demanded that every law enforcement officer in the area investigate immediately, including Game Warden Joe Pickett. Of course, things are more complicated than that... ************Spoilers************* In Wolf Pack  a Mexican drug cartel assassination team shot up Saddlestring, killing the sheriff, the prosecutor, critically injuring an FBI agent and more. Nate Romanowski killed the leader of the hit squad and in this book their best assassin...

  Published in 2019 by Recorded Books. Read by David Chandler. Duration: 9 hours, 51 minutes. Unabridged. Synopsis: Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett is back on the job and glad to be doing the mundane work of a game warden once again. The game warden in the district next to his reaches out and tells him about a fancy drone she has spotted. The drone is being used to drive winter-weakened deer and elk into groups and then panic them into stampedes, killing and maiming several of them. Of course, this is a violation of Wyoming law. But, when they go to track down the owner, they find that they are stymied everywhere they look. Once they find the owner, it turns out that they wish they hadn't found what they are looking for... Review: This is a pretty engrossing thriller with lots of action. But... Huge chunks of this book is told from the perspective of characters that are guests in this series. I don't know exactly what percentage, but it felt like Joe Pickett was mostly a guest ...

  Originally published in 2002. Published in 2010 by Recorded Books. Read by David Chandler. Duration: 8 hours, 48 minutes. Unabridged. I have been reading the Joe Pickett series for the last 10 years and I have been reading them all out of order. I started with book number one, went on to number thirteen and so on... So, here I am ten years later with a review of Savage Run (book number two.) The book starts out from the perspective of a radical environmentalist who leads a national organization. However, he is tired of using lawsuits to fight for the environment. He likes to get his hands dirty by spiking trees and cutting fences. While he is out doing that he gets blown up by a bomb that was strapped to a cow.  Photo by DWD Joe Pickett gets called out to the explosion site because there may have been wildlife injured or killed. He finds a horrible mess and soon enough gets sucked into another, much larger situation... This is Box's sophomore effort and there is evidence of...

Published by Macmillan Audio in 2019. Read by Stephen Graybill. Duration: 11 hours, 5 minutes. Unabridged. City of Windows features Lucas Page, a certified genius (an astrophysicist) with a special talent - he can envision the relations between the stars as they rotate in the sky above and predict where they will go mathematically. It is a natural talent, one he's had since he was a little boy. He can apply this skill to crime scenes as well. He can eyeball a crime scene and tell from what direction and angle a shot came from without having to take all of the steps that Crime Scene Investigators usually have to take.  But, he was seriously injured while on the job with the FBI several years ago. The incident took an eye, a hand and part of a leg. He gladly walked away from the FBI and became a college professor. But, when his old partner is killed by a sniper with a very long-range shot on a busy road in New York City in the middle of a snowstorm, Lucas Page is reluctantly called ...

  Originally published in 2006. Published by Recorded Books in 2007. Read by George Guidall. Duration: 9 hours, 48 minutes. Unabridged Walt Longmire's mentor as the Sheriff of Absaroka County is Lucian, a long-retired and extra-cranky one-legged man. Lucian lives in an assisted living home and he calls in Walt when a resident passes away. Nursing home residents passing away isn't normally an event that draws a lot of suspicion, but Lucian insists it was murder. Longmire decides to listen to Lucian and soon enough Walt uncovers a lot more than anyone was expecting... I am coming to the Longmire book series after seeing the entire Longmire TV series. This is technically my third book. I listened to number 3, the first book and now the second book.  And...I am going to give this series a rest for a while. I liked the interesting characters, but the book has serious pacing issues. As I said, I watched the series. My least favorite part of the series was the sequences when Wal...

  Originally published in 2004. Published by Recorded Books in 2007. Read by George Guidall. Duration: 13 hours, 17 minutes. Unabridged. The Longmire book series is the definition of a successful franchise with 16 novels and a six season television series. I watched the series and I enjoyed it immensely, so I decided to give the books a go. There are obvious differences in characters (The Ferg is a massive change, for example), but they are not deal-breakers. I prefer to look at them as another interpretation of the characters.  The main mystery in The Cold Dish was highly adapted for the TV series, so much so that it was basically a whole new mystery. A few years earlier 4 white high school boys sexually assaulted a fellow student. She was Native American who suffered from fetal alcohol syndrome and didn't really understand what had happened. The trial that followed was rough on the local white and Native American communities and ended with minimal punishments for the boys....

Published by Recorded Books in 2007. Read by George Guidall Duration: 8 hours, 42 minutes. Unabridged. Walt Longmire is the Sheriff of Absaroka County in Wyoming and he is off to Philadelphia to visit his daughter Cady. This visit comes as part of a road trip with his friend Henry Standing Bear who is presenting some photos at a museum. To add some extra fun, Walt is going to meet up with his tough-talking deputy Vic's family, since she is also from Philadelphia. Turns out they are entrenched in the police department, from top to bottom. But, before the visit really got started, Cady is pushed off of a balcony and suffers a head injury, leaving her in a coma. Walt and Henry start investigating and soon things start to get very complicated, very fast. This is the third book in this series, but the first one that I have read or listened to. Normally, I don't join series midway, but I felt confident that I could start with this one because I had seen two season of the TV s...

Published in 2018 by G.P. Putnam's Sons. Game Warden Joe Pickett and the new governor of Wyoming have a turbulent relationship at best. The previous governor used Joe as his own personal law enforcement officer from time-to-time. This wasn't because Joe was some sort of rogue cop - quite the opposite. He knew that Joe was a dogged investigator who had a talent for following clues where they led him - or at the very least stumbling around blind and stepping in the middle of the problem on accident. Sure, it had a real cost in damage to trucks (a tradition continued in this book), but Joe could be trusted to do the right thing. In The Disappeared the new governor found about Joe and has tried to use him to deal with political problems masked as law enforcement problems. Joe has refused and the new governor does not deal with rejection well. However, this time there is a real-life law enforcement issue to deal with. A female British executive and media darling has disappeared aft...

Published by Tantor Audio in 2017. Read by David Colacci and Susan Ericksen Duration: 14 hours, 48 minutes Unabridged Matt and Karen Smith decided to visit every National Park in the U.S. National Park System. They decided to only visit the 58 sites that are actually named "National Park". This is important because there are over 400 sites in the park system that have titles like National Monument, National Lakeshore and National Recreational Area - so many that it is doubtful that any one person has been to them all. As if to prove this point, just after the Smiths published the first edition to this book, a new National Park was added to they system and they had to go visit it and update their own book just to keep their own record intact.  The book is written as a series of e-mails back to their sometimes traveling partners Bob and Sue. Bob and Sue never actually accompany them on one of these trips. They alternate back and forth narrating their adventures in the or...

Published in 2017 by G.P. Putnam's Sons. In 2015's Endangered , C.J. Box introduced his readers to the Cates family. The Cates family was a dangerous group by anyone's standards - likely to poach wildlife, cheat business partners or maybe just get in a fight for the sheer fun of it. The most dangerous members of the family are the mom and the golden child Dallas. Dallas is also a champion professional rodeo star and should have been a real celebrity in his hometown of Saddlestring, except for the fact that no one can stand him or his family. Joe Pickett helped break up the Cates family crime ring and in the process most of the family was killed. Dallas Cates and his mother went to jail. His mother is serving a life sentence. In the process of her family being taken down she broke her neck and is now paralyzed. Joe Pickett has a problem. Dallas Cates has just been released from jail and it's clear that he wants revenge. He hasn't made a move yet, but it is obvi...

Originally published in 2005. Wyoming Game Warden Joe Pickett has been re-assigned. Normally, he covers the area around the town of Saddlestring but he has been temporarily re-assigned to a plum location - Jackson, Wyoming - the home of the Grand Tetons and a well-known retreat for the rich and the famous. While Joe is thrilled for the opportunity, he is not happy about the circumstances behind it. A fellow game warden that he knew and respected suffered some sort of mental breakdown and killed himself. Plus, his family has been receiving ominous "breather" phone messages at all times of day and night... So, Joe Pickett goes off to Jackson only to find that this new assignment is extraordinarily complicated by politically-connected power players, trendy protesters and the investigation into the previous game warden's suicide and things are getting weirder and more complicated all of the time... I am reading this series in what seems to be an insane random order. ...

When Joe Met Nate...    Originally Published in 2003 Wyoming Game Warden Joe Pickett is making his rounds when he sees a hunter open fire on a herd of Elk, killing many more than a hunting license would allow. It turns out he is the local administrator of federal lands, the man who approves permits, makes rental agreements for grazing or logging and the like. He escapes Joe's custody for a few minutes, only to be found pinned to a tree - the victim of an attack with a hunting bow. The local sheriff has a suspect in mind - a local anti-government type that Joe has heard of but has not met - Nate Romanowski (for those who have not read the series, Joe and Nate become de facto  partners in many of the books in this series). Joe suspects that Nate is not the real killer and goes off on his own to do a little detective work on the side. He has his eyes on a wandering group of anti-government activists who have set up camp in a federal forest. And, they include the b...

Originally released in 2007 by Brilliance Audio. Read by Dick Hill Duration: 16 hours, 34 minutes Unabridged Jack Reacher is back. He is tracked down by his deceased brother's former colleague in the Secret Service (and ex-girlfriend) because she wants him to take a run at the security around the Vice President-elect in order to test it. It turns out there is a serious plot to kill the Vice President-elect and Reacher and a partner he has brought in to help join in to hunt for the plotters. This is a typical Reacher book - lots of snide comments, fistfights and even gunplay. The part where he is brought in by the Secret Service is a stretch, but Lee Child makes it palatable. The audiobook is read by veteran reader Dick Hill. He gives Reacher a strong voice and I think he really gets the character. I rate this audiobook 4 stars out of 5. This audiobook can be found on Amazon.com here: Without Fail by Lee Child.

Published in 2016 by G.P. Putnam's Sons This installment in the saga of Joe Pickett starts out with a bear encounter in the mountains and ends up in a violent confrontation in Wyoming's Red Desert. Adobe Town - a part of the Red Desert. Photo by Randy C. Bunney; Great Circle Photographics. Joe Pickett's special relationship with the Governor is coming to an end because the Governor's term is coming to an end. But, that doesn't stop him from going on one last special mission to the Red Desert area of Wyoming. Meanwhile, Nate Romanowski has been approached by men from a secret group of government agents who are worried about national security issues. They know all about Nate and his delicate legal situation and promise to clear all of that up if he goes on a special assignment for them in the Red Desert area of Wyoming. Also, Joe's daughter Sheridan goes for a weekend camping trip to volunteer to help an unknown activist group in (you guessed it) the Red ...

Published in 2015 by G.P. Putnam's Sons Technically, this is a Joe Pickett and Nate Romanowski novel but they have no interaction throughout the book. Nate has been released from prison because of a complex deal between the feds and Joe Pickett's boss, the Governor of Wyoming. But, one of the conditions of his release is that he cannot have any contact with Joe Pickett - a part of the deal that was tossed in out of spite by the FBI agent that negotiated the deal. Romanowski agrees and heads off to a new life with his new love interest.  They have opened a business in which he will use his hunting falcons to clear out smaller birds from barns and the like. But, Romanowski soon discovers that he was mostly let out of prison to become bait for the people that he testified against in prison so that the FBI can have a chance to nab them - maybe before they kill Nate, maybe not. Meanwhile, Wyoming Game Warden Joe Pickett is dealing with troubles of his own. His adopted daughter...

Originally published in 1995. Set on the Wind River Arapaho reservation in Central Wyoming, this murder mystery features a likable cast of characters and great descriptions of cultural aspects of the Arapaho. Comparisons will inevitably be made to Tony Hillerman's series set amongst the Navajo and this book fares quite well in the comparison. The mystery involves the murder of Harvey Castle, the tribal chairman in the middle of the Ethete powwow. The custom is that everyone camps out in tipis for the event and Harvey Castle is found stabbed to death in his tipi - murdered in his sleep. The local police and the FBI quickly find a suspect but Father John O'Malley of the reservation's Jesuit mission doesn't buy it. He starts his own investigation and soon ruffles a lot of feathers as he starts to figure out who really killed Harvey Castle... I really like the John O'Malley character. He was a once proud priest who was humbled by alcoholism and sent out in the...