Vicious Circle by C.J. Box

Published by G.P. Putnam's Sons on March 21, 2017

Vicious Circle is the latest entry in a series that has grown tired. Readers who want to read what is essentially the same story over and over will enjoy it. Readers who hope to find something fresh in a stale series will probably be disappointed.

Dave Farkus calls Joe Pickett and leaves a message to tell him he overheard a conversation that Dallas Cates was having about Joe’s family. He doesn’t reveal the contents of the conversation and he disappears on a hunting trip before Joe can talk to him. Joe takes a break from hunting for a poaching ring to hunt for Farkus. It turns out that other people are also hunting for Farkus. They find him first.

Joe is worried because Dallas Cates had an unpleasant relationship with his daughter Alice. C.J. Box tells us that Dallas served two-to-four years in a penitentiary for a misdemeanor hunting violation, which isn’t possible, but this isn’t the first time Box has been mistaken about Wyoming law. Later, Joe is pleased that he obtained a “clean” statement from a woman in custody because she “didn’t ask for a lawyer,” but seems to be unaware that her statement can’t be used against her because he didn’t give her a Miranda warning. For a law enforcement officer, Joe knows shockingly little about the law.

Marcus Hand (clearly modeled after Wyoming lawyer Gerry Spence) returns in Vicious Circle, having married Joe’s mother-in-law, who also returns. Nate Romanowski is back, conveniently stumbling across the dead body of a woman who is tied into the Dallas Cates story. Nate ruminates about how he misses killing people who (in Nate’s judgment, as opposed to that of, for instance, a jury) deserve to be killed. He almost kills someone based on a three-second snatch of a conversation he overhears, which suggests that Nate’s judgment is questionable at best. Box occasionally assures the reader that Romanowski isn’t a “cold-blooded killer” but that’s exactly what he is.

Why Joe is so fond of this vigilante, who stands for all the lawlessness that Joe supposedly hates, is beyond me. At one point in the novel, Nate cuts off someone’s ears. Joe, who is such a model law enforcement officer that he once ticketed the governor for fishing without a license (as we are reminded in every novel), doesn’t arrest his friend Nate for this act of mayhem. At the end of the book, he even decides not to enforce one of the hunting laws he’s charged with enforcing. Good for him, but Joe’s situational law enforcement should be troubling to readers who admire his sanctimonious “by the book” attitude. Are readers not troubled by Joe’s hypocrisy?

I will say that Vicious Circle takes a more balanced view of the criminal justice system than some other books in the series (perhaps Box has been influenced by Gerry Spence?). The book acknowledges that too many police officers view criminal defense attorneys as the enemy and that too many cops plant evidence or engage in other misconduct to improve the state’s odds of convicting the people they perceive as bad guys. I’m glad Box made that point, but that's not enough to make the novel worth a reader's time.

The contrived plot is familiar and predictable. Joe’s family is threatened, again. Joe and Nate face peril, again. The story flows smoothly and makes for the unchallenging reading experience that Box fans seem to appreciate, but it never generates the kind of tension that a thriller should create. It’s actually kind of dull, as is Joe. It’s a shame Box hasn't done anything to breathe some life into this series.

NOT RECOMMENDED

Force of Nature by C.J. Box

Published by Putnam on March 20, 2012

Force of Nature is much better than the last Joe Pickett novel, which was so full of plot holes that it made for an awfully bumpy ride.  Force of Nature focuses on Nate Romanowski, who is finally facing a showdown with rogue elements of “The Five,” a group of Special Forces operatives to which Romanowski once belonged.  Their leader, a megalomaniac named Nemecek, wants to take Romanowski out.  To that end, Nemecek recruits three amateur assassins who approach Romanowski in a boat.  Pickett becomes involved when a fisherman discovers a boat full of corpses.  With the sheriff he despises nipping at his heals, Pickett finds himself facing the uncomfortable choice of pursuing or helping his buddy Romanowski.

Romanowski is a falconer and so is Nemecek.  C.J. Box appears to have done meticulous research into the art of falconry.  His descriptions of a falconer’s mindset are convincing.  The symbolic parallel between the falcon that hunts other birds and the dangerous man who hunts Romanowski might be a bit obvious but it’s nonetheless an effective device for telling the story.  Romanowski’s relationship with falcons and the role they play in his connection with Nemecek is the most interesting part of the novel.

Pickett appeals to readers because (in Romanowski’s words) Pickett is “straight and upright and burdened with ethics, responsibility, and a sense of duty.”  Romanowski also has a sense of ethics, but “straight and upright” he is not.  Romanowski has a sort of spirituality -- he tells us that he is of the Earth, not walking upon it -- and pursues falconry to get closer to “the primitive world.”  Romanowski is unquestionably primitive.  He keeps a braid of his dead lover’s hair dangling from his gun -- which is strange, but Romanowski is a strange dude, machismo on steroids.  That makes him (in this novel, at least) an interesting character, although Box sometimes takes him a bit over the top.

By contrast, when Box writes about Pickett, the reader is treated to a strong, silent man.  When he doesn’t know what to say (which is often), he looks down at his boots.  The boot gazing wears a bit thin after a few novels.  At least Romanowksi forces Pickett out of the rather dull (from a reader’s perspective) black-and-white world in which he prefers to dwell.  Romanowski doesn’t worry much about hunting season or game permits as he kills his evening meal, the kind of attitude that Pickett, in his role as game warden, frowns upon, but Pickett gives his friend Romanowski a pass for his many transgressions (revenge killing among them).  Pickett’s discomfort -- his attempt to have it both ways by refusing to listen when Romanowski wants to confess his sins -- exposes his willingness to engage in situational ethics when it comes to friendship and thus humanizes him.

As is so often true in thrilerworld, the story suffers from credibility issues.  It feeds upon the popular paranoid delusion that the government has the ability to intercept and erase all digital communications (including emails and website postings) that mention a particular subject or person.  Romanowski should know better.  It’s also hard to accept that a trained operative like Romanowski would be wedded to the belief that “torture works” when most serious students of interrogation agree that torture produces inaccurate information.  Romanowski even makes a bizarre speech about the “savagery in the streets” America would experience if not for the underappreciated tough guys who torture the evildoers in faraway lands.  Finally, I didn’t believe for a moment the romance that develops late in the story.  On the other hand, Romanowski’s dark secret, when finally revealed, is believable if anti-climactic, although his explanation for failing to blow the whistle on Nemecek makes little sense.

Credibility problems aside, Force of Nature tells an enjoyable story.  The action scenes are fun, the pace is swift, and the parallel plotlines come together nicely in the end (with, of course, the obligatory but unusually clever shoot-out).

RECOMMENDED

Cold Wind by C.J. Box

Published by Putnam on March 22, 2011

Cold Wind gets off to a promising start as Joe Pickett discovers the body of his mother-in-law's most recent husband chained to the spinning blade of a wind-powered turbine. The plot begins to deteriorate when his mother-in-law, Missy, is arrested for the crime, the murder weapon having been found in the back of her car. The prosecutor, although allegedly a bright woman, believes she has a strong case because one of her ex-husbands claims that she tried to hire him to kill her husband. It apparently never occurs to the prosecutor to wonder (1) how she is going to prove that an elderly woman managed to climb a turbine tower and chain a dead body to a spinning blade, (2) how she will convince the jury that Missy would even want to display his body that way, or (3) why a jury would view the unsubstantiated story told by an embittered ex-husband as credible. The prosecutor seems to be counting on the jury to convict Missy because they resent her wealth and arrogance, but that attitude is inconsistent with what Pickett tells us about her professionalism.

A second storyline is just silly. Joe's buddy Nate Romanowski is living in a cave, hiding from five former members of a "rogue branch" of Special Forces who now work for Homeland Security. An attempt is made on his life, not by the rogues, but by a woman who hires two nitwits to shoot at his cave with a rocket launcher. How the woman acquired the weapon never seems to concern the nitwits and apparently it isn't supposed to concern the reader either, since the explanation eventually provided is laughable. That storyline turns into a fairly pedestrian tale of vigilante justice.

Few of the characters in Cold Wind have enough brain cells to rub together to produce a spark of intelligence. Only Missy's lawyer, Marcus Hand (clearly modeled after Gerry Spence, right down to the description of his hair and attire and the location and nature of his law practice) has any personality, but he is oddly ignorant of criminal procedure (making no protest, for instance, when a Justice of the Peace bases an adverse decision largely on the fact that Missy shops out-of-state instead of buying goods from the JP's feed store). Just as ignorant is the prosecutor, who repeatedly claims it would be "inappropriate" for her to listen to Pickett, a law enforcement officer who has information that might cast doubt on Missy's guilt, when in fact it is her ethical duty to do so. Box's fanciful description of legal proceedings (there are more howlers than those I've described) makes it impossible to take the novel seriously.

On the positive side, the story proceeds at a brisk pace, slowed only by occasional lectures on wind-generated energy that are meant to educate Pickett. Box's writing style is competent: not stirring but not awful. Pickett stumbles upon a crime that, while not terribly relevant to the plot, is inventive (I don't think it would work in the real world, but at least it's interesting). The ending contains a twist that saves it from being as anti-climactic as it initially appeared to be, although the twist was a bit predictable. Overall, Box did enough things right to keep me reading to the end, but not enough to make me encourage others to buy the novel.

A final warning: Some of the characters engage in a fair amount of pontificating about the evils of government support for wind energy. I don't care one way or another about opinions expressed by fictional characters (I don't pick up a thriller expecting to find an accurate, balanced view of energy policy) but some readers prefer their thrillers to remain entirely free of politics. Those readers might want to avoid this novel.

NOT RECOMMENDED