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C. J. Box's novels featuring Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett have a richness about them while being infused throughout with a sense of truth, capturing at once both the tranquility and sudden violence that one encounters in nature at all of its levels. Box's presentation is evenhanded --- those with business or environmental concerns will find both support and opposition for either position --- and never gets in the way of his own story, which at its most basic is about the ongoing struggle of a good man interacting with the quiet evil around him.
Pickett is a bit of an Everyman. He's not so much an underachiever as a man with limited talents and gifts, shortcomings balanced by determination and a sense of right and wrong that never falters. He's the antithesis of a political animal, and while that is not necessarily a shortcoming in the real world, it is the kiss of death for anyone who ostensibly seeks a career in government service. This stark reality is brought to the foreground within the pages of IN PLAIN SIGHT, the latest of the Pickett novels.
IN PLAIN SIGHT proceeds along twin tracks, both of which involve Pickett and will dramatically affect his future. The first concerns the wealthy Scarlett family, a long-established presence in rural Colorado whose influence extends to the state capital in Denver and beyond. The sudden disappearance of Opal Scarlett, the family matriarch, sparks the already-smoldering feud between Arlen and Hank Scarlett, two of her three adult sons. Arlen and Hank are successes in their respective rights, and both see themselves as the heir apparent to the family fortune and influence. Wyatt, the third son, is buffeted between his two brothers, outclassed intellectually and emotionally, but is not without primitive, unexpected resources of his own.
When the local community begins taking sides, Pickett finds himself caught uneasily in the middle --- not only between the warring Arlen and Hank but also between local law enforcement and Randy Pope, Pickett's boss and adversary. Pope, in particular, is riding herd on Pickett, inflicting upon him the governmental equivalent of "the death of a thousand cuts" in the hope that he'll eventually quit or give cause to fire him.
Meanwhile, there is a dangerous and malevolent force that has visited the area in the form of John Wayne Keeley, a homicidal sociopath whose motivation for living is a seething anger fueled by his desire for revenge against Pickett for what he believes are wrongs occasioned by Pickett against his family. When Keeley quietly and expertly interjects himself into the midst of the Scarlett family dispute, Pickett suddenly finds himself under attack from a seemingly invisible foe who has no limits with respect to what he is capable of doing. As events move forward and intersect on their way to an apocalyptic ending, Pickett must marshal what few resources he has, not only to save himself but also to preserve those whom he holds most dear.
Often outclassed and always outgunned, Pickett has all the best qualities of the archetypal figure whom we have come to know as a "hero." Often a victim of his own limitations, and done in almost as much by his shortcomings as by his adversaries, Pickett steadfastly refuses to go along to get along if such a course results in a compromising of his principles. The results are cataclysmic; as Pickett notes parenthetically near the end, "everything will be different." Box may have dropped a hint or two throughout the book, but there is no doubt that the next novel in this thoughtful, dramatic series will present changes and challenges, good and otherwise, to Pickett's world.
No matter. The Pickett novels, at heart, are not so properly classified as mysteries or works of suspense as they are modern westerns, in the finest sense of that term. Arguably, Box is steadily staking his claim as the heir apparent to such masters of the genre as Zane Gray and Louis L' Amour. IN PLAIN SIGHT is the strongest argument to date in favor of that proposition.
--- Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub
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