Storm Watch by C.J. Box

Published by G.P. Putnam's Sons on February 28, 2023

Storm Watch could have been titled Red Meat. I mean, you’ve got the Chinese Communist Party. You’ve got climate change denialism and complaints about mask mandates. You’ve got “Silicon Valley activists and the Hollywood elite” who see Wyoming libertarians as a threat to their way of life. You’ve got “coastal elites” who want to “shut down our energy industry, our cattle ranches, our timber industry, and just about every part of our American way of life. They’ve never owned a gun, gone to church, or served in the military.” You’ve got “Washington D.C. elites” who eliminated the “legitimate livelihoods” of Keystone pipeline workers. You’ve got complaints about the “deep state,” electric cars, and “children being indoctrinated and corrupted in their schools by unscrupulous teachers and administrators who preached gender fluidity and taught critical race theory.” You’ve got hysterical claims that “they’re coming for our guns.” You’ve got the FBI at the vanguard of a war against conservatives. You’ve got the phrases “domestic terrorists” and “insurrection” appearing in quotation marks to signal a disbelief that the phrases represent reality.

To be fair, the protagonist of this series, Joe Pickett, does not personally embrace any of this nonsense. Neither does Joe denounce it. Joe is studiously free from opinions. At least, he feels no need to express any opinions that don’t relate to his job as a game warden, western apparel, his mother-in-law, or his daughters’ boyfriends. Nate Romanowski, the supporting character whose role is to represent paranoid members of the far right, nods approvingly at many of the rants, giving far right readership a reason to keep coming back to the series. Nate is one of theirs.

Nate complains that the Secretary of the Interior makes decisions that benefit the entire nation, not just Wyoming. He also complains that public lands exist mostly in the West. Yeah, but that’s not a red/blue issue. The state with the most federally owned land is a blue state (Nevada), and the percentage of federal ownership in California is about the same as it is in Wyoming. Federal land ownership isn’t some conspiracy that targets red states, but fact-checking is noticeably absent in Storm Watch.

Joe and Nate both recognize that many of the people who embrace these views are losers and meth addicts. One of their apologists argues that they are “men whose dignity has been taken from them” because they lost their pipeline jobs. Mind you, the Keystone pipeline might have created three dozen permanent jobs across the entire nation. Some welders and pipefitters lost the opportunity for temporary employment on a specific project, but they didn’t lose actual jobs because the permits that were granted and quickly revoked never took effect. If you lose your dignity because you didn’t get a job that never existed, it seems to me you’re looking for an excuse to explain your meth addiction.

So put the red meat aside and what have you got? Joe is tracking an elk that was injured in a car accident. He finds a building with noisy air conditioning in the middle of winter, which strikes him as odd. Then he finds a dead body hanging out of a window in the building. The dead guy is a professor at Wyoming’s only university. Joe later learns that the professor is suspected of being a Chinese spy (because he’s Chinese) despite the utter absence of anything worth spying on in Wyoming, much less at a public university where academic projects aren’t national secrets. The building that puzzles Joe houses computers that are engaged in cryptocurrency mining. Joe also chases snowmobilers who are harassing elk in the hope that their antlers will fall off in advance of the season when it is legal to collect fallen antlers. The snowmobilers have something to do with the dead professor. All of this relates to dual threats to the current Republican governor’s upcoming reelection campaign: one by a fringe group of far right snowmobiling meth addicts and the second by the former Democratic governor, who has a distaste for the current governor’s coziness with the Chinese Communist Party.

The key villain, a paranoid nutcase named Jason Demo, believes that real Americans own guns, go to church, drive a pickup, and shop at Walmart. He’s confident that elites (meaning people who don’t drive pickups, shop at Walmart, etc.) have declared war on the West, the West being where real Americans live, except for the ones on the West Coast and those who don’t drive pickups, shop at Walmart, etc. Demo rants about high unemployment (apparently he doesn’t read the news) and complains that there isn’t enough mining and oil drilling on federal land (again, a belief not driven by actual facts). He believes that environmental concerns keep us from being energy independent, a point of view that’s pretty funny, given the number of times this series has lectured about the evils of wind energy. Demo is ready to make a stand via insurgency, apparently failing to notice how well the last insurgency went. That happens when you don’t read the news.

This isn’t a bad story if you don't take the red meat seriously, including the notion that “rogue” FBI agents created an extremist group so they could arrest domestic terrorists of their own invention. Yeah, whatever. And if you ignore the governor’s collusion with the Chinese. He might have had something to do with the spy balloon over Montana, although the book was written before the balloon was detected. The story moves quickly and I thought it was entertaining, perhaps because it is so farcical.

As usual, Joe doesn’t do much of anything, apart from getting stuck in the snow and fretting that a boy (even a churchgoing boy who wears the correct western gear) might get into his daughter’s jeans. There’s not much chance of that happening. Nate and his friend Geronimo take care of the necessary killing so that Joe can keep his hands clean. The novel proves again that the person with the biggest gun wins (Nate is proud of having one of the world’s biggest handguns, while Geronimo has a shotgun with not one, not two, but three barrels).

In its early days, before C.J. Box made such an obvious attempt to appeal to a far right readership by giving a voice to their silly grievances, the Joe Pickett series was much better. While Box has never been much of a prose stylist, he does capture the beauty that Wyoming residents find its their desolate environment. Box’s best work is the apolitical Blue Heaven, a novel that proves Box can mine the setting of unpopulated western states for good atmosphere and craft sound plots if he stays away from politics. 

The Pickett novels have always characterized environmentalists as extremists, so I am heartened by the half-hearted effort to recognize that people on the far right take extreme and dangerous action, even if they must be goaded to do so by rogue FBI agents. Box is careful not to make Pickett the voice of extremism, which is this novel’s saving grace. Still, I get the sense that Box is trying to straddle a line by appealing to an audience with politically extreme views without expressly endorsing them.

There is barely enough good storytelling in Storm Watch to overcome the neutral presentation of far right talking points, but the novel advances too many unchallenged lies for me to recommend it without reservations. I suppose this would be a good book for fact-challenged readers who might enjoy chewing a healthy serving of red meat, but it’s also a good read for rational readers who enjoy laughing at far right fantasies.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS