Cold Wind

Another good C J Box book. I’ve read all of them in the Joe Pickett series up to this one and it doesn’t disappoint.

I enjoy the way Pickett will introduce current issues of controversy into his stories. In this case, the wind farms that are despoiling great views the nation over. Without turning into a rant, Pickett does a good job of presenting the “other point of view,” (in other words, the non-pc point of view) in issues that are very controversial in the West.

Cold Wind involves wind turbines, murder, and the mother-in-law who makes all others look like a blessing Missy (whatever her current last name is with husband number five). Joe Pickett brings the same less-than-perfect everyman perspective to solving the case. It has a great ending, particularly for fans of the series.

Get it and read it.

In this book, Joe Pickett gets caught up in a case that is close to home. His father in law, Earl Alden, the fifth husband to Missy, his wife’s mother is found dead and Missy is accused of the crime. Missy asks Joe for help, and because Joe is wondering what really happened, he gets involved. There is the usual great character development and excellent story line which kept me wondering what was going to occur next.

I love this series, andJoe Pickett as the game warden. But with the last two books, I feel the author is getting farther and farther from the original premise of Joe as a game warden, and is turning him more into a sort of rogue detective. I like that aspect too, but would love to see more of the game and fish aspect again.

Im just tired of reading gifted authors whos editors dont notice missing prepositions. Rereading a passage more than once or twice because I cant understand a sentence is maddening.

About the story: Missy is becoming more damaging to Joes marriage. April is being as disruptive as she wants and makes the home ring with discord. All in all even though Joes finally working from home hes not sure coming home is good.

I’ve read every Joe Pickett novel (though not bothered to review them all) and this is one of his best. Unlike Blood Trail where I could figure out the killer almost from the point she was introduced in the story, I was always second-guessing my thoughts as to “who done it?” throughout the book. Unlike Box’s occasional flub, like 1000 yard pistol shots, his description of the distorted incentives associated with the wind energy program seem spot on in my experience. We had massive wind farms built in west Texas but only a handful of towers were permitted to turn for years. Then the truth came out that the hundreds of towers had been built without transmission lines to get the power to market, so every CPS rate payer was hit with a massive increase in his bill in order to fund the building of the transmission lines, after the fact. Studies showed it would have been far cheaper and more flexible just to have built a couple natural gas fired plants and been done with it. The point is, such big-government, big incentive programs attract a lot of money and a lot of powerful interests who may well stop at nothing. Box does a great job of weaving that into a first rate murder mystery. Yes, the basic theme of the plot has been done before, but Box does a great job of wrapping his characters around the idea in a way that does not leave you anything you can hang your hat on to say, I know exactly where this is going. He also does a nice job of showing the incompetent and corrupt side of small town politicos not just the Federal guys. We have a corrupt incompetent sheriff (we’ve seen that before) and a judge more interested in sheep hunting than justice. In fact the FBI comes out looking ok in this novel even though their appearance is a cameo. Nate returns in all his enigmatic glory; what is not to like?

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