Winterkill [Hardcover]

C. J. Box (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 8, 2003

Award-winning writer C. J. Box returns with a vengeance in this thrilling new novel featuring Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett.

It's an hour away from darkness with a bitter winter storm raging when Joe Pickett finds himself deep in the forest edging Battle Mountain, shotgun in his left hand, his truck's steering wheel handcuffed to his right-and Lamar Gardiner's arrow-riddled corpse splayed against the tree in front of him.

Lamar's murder and the sudden onslaught of the snowstorm warns: Get off the mountain. But Joe knows this episode is far from over. Somewhere in the dense timber, a killer draws back his bowstring-with Joe as his prey.

Joe's pursuit of the killer through the rugged mountains that surround the snow-packed town of Saddlestring takes a horrifying turn when his beloved foster daughter is kidnapped. Now it's personal-and Joe will stop at nothing to get her back.

Steeped in the sharp cliffs and the brutal wilderness of the Wyoming landscape, Winterkill is a masterful performance, darkly compelling and utterly unforgettable. C. J. Box places all the elements of a classic mystery in a setting where the dangerous beauty of one of America's last frontiers plays accomplice to the darkest of human motives.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett returns in this third adventure in C.J. Box's tough, tender, and engrossing series, which just keeps getting better. When a forest service supervisor is murdered right after a manic shooting spree that slaughtered a herd of elk, a mysterious stranger who trains falcons and carries an unusual weapon is arrested for the slaying. Then a special investigative team headed by a devious, vindictive woman arrives in Saddlestring, bent on a bloody confrontation with a group of government-hating survivalists camped out on federal land. Among then is Jeannie Keeley, who abandoned her daughter April three years earlier. Since then, April has become like a daughter to Joe and his wife Marybeth, and a sister to their own children. Now April is right in the middle of what promises to be the last stand for the ragged band of refugees from the firestorms of Waco, Ruby Ridge, and the Montana Freemen, and only Nate the falconer, who owes Joe his life for finding the real killer of the supervisor and freeing him from jail, may be able to save her before the Bighorn Mountains are covered in blood. A tense, taut thriller marked by lyrical renderings of the harsh, beautiful landscape, Winterkill's subtext, as in Box's previous novels, is the conflict between individual rights and freedoms and governmental power that continues to smolder in the towns and valleys of the American west. --Jane Adams

From Publishers Weekly

Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett runs into trouble again in Box's third fast-paced novel (after Open Season and Savage Run), which focuses on the conflict between parental custody and foster care, as well as the growth of "independent nation" cults. As usual, Pickett, though fallible, is the voice of reason and honesty amid a cacophony of greed and evil. During a horrendous blizzard, he finds the body of Lamar Gardiner, "the District Supervisor for the Twelve Sleep National Forest," pinned by arrows to a tree, near seven illegally shot elk. Sheriff "Bud" Barnum suspects a band of misfits, the Sovereign Citizens, which is camping in the forest, among them Jeannie Keeley, the birth mother of the Picketts' foster daughter, April. Pickett suspects locals killed the combative Gardiner. Soon, the little town of Saddlestring is swarming with press, as well as U.S. Forest Service bureaucrats, including the psychotic Melinda Strickland, and two vicious FBI agents. When Pickett learns of a plan to raid the encampment, he resolves to warn the Sovereigns, especially since Jeannie has April there. Box's description of the harsh yet splendid Wyoming landscape is vivid and memorable, his handling of complex social issues evenhanded and unsentimental. But most of his characters tend to be either two-dimensional villains or saints, and in each book the life of a member of Pickett's family is threatened. Box needs to develop more believable characters to realize his potential as an outstanding new talent.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 384 pages
• Publisher: Putnam Adult; First Edition edition (May 8, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1402556888
• ISBN-13: 978-1402556883
• ASIN: 0399150455
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (53 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #659,389 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

C. J. Box is the author of the award-winning Joe Pickett series of novels, including Open Season (2001), Savage Run (2002), Winterkill (2003), Trophy Hunt (2004), Out of Range (2005) and the upcoming In Plain Sight (May, 2006). He's the winner of the Anthony Award, Prix Calibre 38 Award (France), the Macavity Award, the Gumshoe Award, the Barry Award, and an Edgar Award and L.A. Times Book Prize finalist. Open Season was a New York Times Notable Book and three of the novels have been Booksense 76 picks.


The novels have been national bestsellers and have been translated into 12 languages.


Box is a Wyoming native and has worked as a ranch hand, surveyor, fishing guide, a small town newspaper reporter and editor, and he co-owns an international tourism marketing firm with his wife, Laurie. An avid outdoorsman, Box has hunted, fished, hiked, ridden, and skied throughout Wyoming and the Mountain West. He serves on the Board of Directors for the Cheyenne Frontier Days Rodeo.


Box lives with his family outside of Cheyenne, Wyoming.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Joe Pickett gets a sidekick, maybe, August 7, 2004

By 

David W. Nicholas (Van Nuys, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Winterkill (A Joe Pickett Novel) (Mass Market Paperback)

This is the third book in the Joe Pickett series, and unconventional is the rule in each of the books. The author manages to make a character with a wife and kids into something of an action hero, complete with gun, pickup truck, and dog, and a series of enemies that attempt everything from annoyance to murder to thwart him.

In the current book, Pickett has a murder on his hands. In this case the murder is complicated by the fact that the victim was a local Federal wildlife officer who just went nuts and killed a whole flock of elk. Pickett arrested him, but he escaped, only to be brutally and strangely killed.

Complicating things are two factors. First, the local authorities have been preempted by a Federal investigator who has taken charge of everything. She's convinced that there's a conspiracy of right-wing nutcases, survivalists who want to kill Federal agents, and of course she's going to hunt them down, damn the consequences. One of her principle suspects is a local mountain man type who has almost no interaction with the rest of society, and raises falcons at his house. That guy turns out to be more than everyone bargained for.

I enjoyed this book a great deal, and would recommend it to anyone who likes the wilderness or detective stories. One proviso: the author isn't a conservative politically (one of his previous books involves the Endangered Species list) but this book deals with the Federal government and bureaucrats rather harshly. Just a warning.

16 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars A Dark Fantastic, January 19, 2005

By 

Oldcoyote - See all my reviews

This review is from: Winterkill (Hardcover)

I hated this book! Or maybe I was just rooting for C.J. to get his stuff together in the third book and have Joe Pickett ready to fly for another twenty years. It's what I expected anyhow. Didn't happen.

The first Joe Pickett story seemed a little tall and convoluted, but the yarn was spun tightly and with dexterity and wit. I couldn't put it down. You knew that C.J. Box and Joe Pickett would be around for a long while. The second book had me looking forward to more Joe Pickett yarns in spite of exploding cows. An audience was building. Word was getting around that C.J. Box could keep you interested. It was time for Pickett to settle down a bit, ease off the fantastics, and start a long career. Then he fell off the mountain.

WINTERKILL opens with a humiliating and extremely unlikely scene of a Forest Supervisor's "nervous breakdown" that contributes nothing substantial to the story. From there, it traverses a litany of extremes. Our humble, heroic game warden in remote Wyoming is forced down a gauntlet of sociopathology, psychopathology, political aberrations, weather extremes, bureaucratic obstruction and cover-up, and the killing of a carefully developed sympathetic character. Then, incredibly, staight-arrow Joe Picket becomes complicit in a felony that will never be discovered.

C.J. Box is a clever, compelling writer, but I don't see how Joe Pickett will ever recover from this dark detour.

12 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Great Story, Sloppy Editing, May 19, 2003

By 

Marlo C. Kirkpatrick (Madison, MS United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Winterkill (Hardcover)

Winterkill brings the same fine storytelling and excellent sense of character and place found in Box's previous Pickett novels. Kudos to Box, who has quickly become one of my favorites.
The only thing that prevents me from giving this book five stars is the unforgiveably sloppy editing. One character is christened both "Trey" and "Terry" - on the same page. A crucial event in the novel - the abandonment of April - is referred to as having happened three years ago, then in another mention, five years ago. The book is also filled with distracting typos, including several double words ("he saw that that the snow had melted" type things). Errors of this kind are unfortunate and distracting in a book of this caliber. I can only assume the publisher was overly eager to get the next book by this award-winning author on the shelves.