Great story again

For at least the third time, our family book pusher provided us with a novel by C. J. Box. I think she likes carefully reading these before they become welcome gifts in our household.

I first read a C. J. Box mystery/adventure when Nancy bought one in West Yellowstone. The first one I wrote about here was Winterkill in 2006. However, I mentioned then that I'd read two earlier books by Box. (I read Open Season and Savage Run in the days before I began posting these notes on the blog. I have written about Free Fire, Blue Heaven, and Below Zero. Along the way, I passed on reading Three Weeks to Say Goodbye because it sounded too grim.

Box is such a good story teller, that I've read most of his books even though, as I've said before, I don't like nastily violent books like these.

As with at least two other Box novels, I didn't want to put this book down once I got into it. Paradoxilly, I kept taking breaks in my reading because I didn't want to be done with the book.

There are two stories in Cold Wind, and they pretty much run parallel to one another until the end of the book. In an earlier book, Wyoming ranger Joe Pickett and his outside-the-law doppleganger Nate Romanowski were seriously estranged from one another. As we might expect one of this book's stories is about Joe and the other is about Nate. At the end of the book, the two stories merge and Joe and Nate reach a kind of truce. And the ending sets up the next story which is likely to threaten Nate, Joe, and Joe's family.

Between the covers of this book, a fabulously rich rancher is murdered, his widow (Joe Pickett's mother-in-law) is accused of the crime, someone clumsily tries to kill Nate, Joe's oldest daughter heads off to college, and Joe spends time monitoring the fall hunting season in north central Wyoming between taking comp days to investigate the murder. The plot is satisfyingly complicated, but it's the story telling that stands out.

As usual, there's a fair amount of improbability in the details of the story, but I can overlook it when it's told this well.

Have you read Cold Wind? other C. J. Box books? Write and tell this little bit of the world what you think.

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• C. J. Box's web site
• Wyofile on the local star of fiction
• An interview with Box at the blog Jungle Red
• Tracy Grant's review of Cold Wind at The Washington Post
• Chris Rubich's review in The Billings Gazette

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From the Kindle store

A shoot 'em down

I've mostly enjoyed Dana Stabenow's mysteries. Some are a lot better than others, but I haven't paid enough attention to tell you offhand which ones were better.

I read Prepared for Rage, her newest, last spring. (You can see I'm catching up with my old reading.) This one takes place mostly in Texas, Florida, and the waters east of Florida, not in Alaska, where most of Stabenow's stories are set.

USCG cutter Munro on which Stabenow spent a month learning about shipboard life and Coast Guard SOP. Climactic action in the book takes place in and near the forward gun turret.

Instead of a setting in a rural native community, this story is set at NASA, on a Coast Guard cutter, and along the trail of a terrorist sleeper cell. The main characters are a shuttle astronaut, a Coast Guard commander, and the seemingly unstoppable leader of the terrorists. The shuttle is about to launch, the cutter is part of security for the launch, and... Well, you can figure out the rest.

The plot is obvious from early in the book. The questions are how Stabenow will describe the action and whether the bad guys will be successful. Well, maybe the last one is not a question. Maybe the question is how close to success will the bad guys get before the good guy thwarts their evil schemes.

A 2006 launch of the shuttle Atlantis.

Yes, this is that much of a melodrama. Add in a love affair between the commander and the astronaut, the presence of the astronaut's parents and the commander's father on the cutter the day of the launch, and the absolutely incredible skills of the terrorist leader. Yes, he's really that talented, smart, and prescient. How will we protect ourselves from these evil doers. (Hint: in this story Homeland Security is no help.)

Does that tell you that Prepared for Rage was not one of Stabenow's best for me? She may enjoy the warm ocean breezes more than the blizzards of Alaska, but I prefer the stories she's written about Kate Shugak, Liam Campbell, and the crew up north.

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