Endangered: book review

Book Review: ENDANGERED, by C. J. Box (regional author) fiction Penguin Publishing, 2015

Wyoming State Fish and Game Warden Joe Pickett finds twenty-one dead sage grouse among shotgun shells at the side of a back-country road. Not only is Joe offended by the wanton killing, but the federal government has been talking about putting sage grouse on the endangered list. Placing their wide-spread prairie habitat off-limits to ranchers, coal miners, timber companies, and clean energy developers would affect Wyoming's whole economy.

While Joe collects the necessary scene photos and a sampling of empty shotgun shells, he gets a call from the county sheriff. A deputy has found a trauma victim in a ditch, barely alive, no ID. “But from the description, Joe, it could be your daughter April.” April Pickett had turned eighteen the previous year, and had run off with a local rodeo cowboy, Dallas Cates. They have rarely heard from her since.

Joe hurries back to town to meet his wife Marybeth at the local hospital. The victim is indeed April, unconscious and unresponsive from blunt head injuries. The Life Flight helicopter arrives from the trauma center in Billings, Montana; Marybeth is allowed to ride with her daughter, with Joe to follow. Joe is certain that Dallas did it.

The Cates family is a scraggly lot, living on twelve acres about twenty miles from town.The father, Eldon, runs a hunters guide business, and services septic tanks outside hunting season. Bull, the oldest son, is not very bright, but powerfully muscled. Joe had once caught Bull and his wife Cora Lee with a six by six elk three days before hunting season opened, and has won their permanent anger. The second son, Timber, is doing a three-year sentence at Rawlins state prison, for carjacking a tourist when his own car ran out of gas. Dallas is the youngest, and his mother's favorite, because he's going to make the family famous with his rodeo stardom. The mother, Brenda, is the brains of the outfit. She now makes a pre-emptive visit to the sheriff''s office to express her sympathy for the Pickett family. She would have brought Dallas too, she says, but he is recovering from serious injuries from his latest bull ride at the rodeo in Houston. She says April left her son severalweeks ago for another rodeo star and they haven't seen her since.

Sheriff Mike Reed and county prosecutor Dulcie Schalk share Joe's doubts about Brenda's story, but have no hard evidence to go on. Things get complicated when April's purse is found on loner Tilden Cardmore's property, not far from where April had been found. Tilden is totally anti-government and uncooperative, defending his home with multiple firearms.

Further, Annie Hatch and Revis Wentworth, of the federal Sage Grouse Task Force arrive to investigate the “sage grouse massacre”, demanding details and documentation when Joe needs to keep ahead of the Cates family. The outlook for April is still in doubt; the neurosurgeon is keeping her in induced coma until the swelling in her brain decreases. And Nate, an old friend of Joe's appears on the scene in time to get shot by Eldon Cates and get admitted to the same intensive care unit, just down the hall from April. His girl friend, Liv Brannon, gets kidnapped by Brenda to keep her from contacting the police.

Brenda appears to be getting more mentally deranged with each passing day. She keeps the girl she has kidnapped in a pit under her husband's machine shop out back. Brenda has never had a daughter, and wants a woman to talk to and comb her hair. At the same time, Liv is made aware that Brenda intends her never to leave this pit alive.

Author C. J. Box handles his characterizations and many-faceted plot very well. This action subgenre can get out of hand if too many characters find themselves improbably situated in just the right place at just the right time---the reader may feel that his stamina and belief are being tested, thus breaking the story's spell. But this story kept me reading to the end. Box lives in Wyoming; this is his fifth Joe Pickett novel.