Below Zero (Joe Pickett Series #9)
A new Joe Pickett novel from the Edgar(r) Award-winning author of Blood Trail.\ Six years ago, Joe Pickett's foster daughter, April, was murdered. Now, someone is leaving phone messages claiming to be the dead girl. As his family struggles with the disturbing event, he discovers that the calls have been placed from locations where serious environmental crimes have occurred. And as the phone calls grow closer, so does the danger.
Search in google:
New York Times best-selling author C. J. Box's Below Zero is the 10th novel featuring Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett. The telephone calls from her stepdaughter April send chills down the spine of Joe's daughter Sherry. Wasn't April murdered six years ago in a bloody massacre? Wondering how this youthful caller knows details only April could know, Sherry becomes confused while Joe grows suspicious. Is the caller April-or are Joe and his family victims of a cruel hoax?The Barnes & Noble ReviewBlue Heaven, Box's previous book, was a terrific stand-alone thriller about rogue L.A. cops retired to Idaho. Below Zero is a return to the Joe Pickett series, Box's ongoing dissection of crime in Wyoming as seen through the eyes of a game warden whose favorite big game is human villains. Below Zero is the ninth Pickett book, and it could be the best one yet. Beautifully written and constructed, with an art that underplays its excitement and emotional strength, it quickly becomes personal with a phone message: "Tell Sherry April called." But April, the Picketts' foster daughter, was killed in a bloody massacre, described in Winterkill, which Joe witnessed. In subsequent calls, the girl calling herself April gives so many details of their life together that Sherry begins to believe she really is alive. Joe is still skeptical. Meanwhile, Box's amazing ability to create villains both frightening and believable kicks into high gear. An older man, Stenko, his son Robert, and a young girl (the one leaving messages and texting Sherry) are traveling across the country. Stenko's purpose is to undo the damage he's done to the environment by erasing his "carbon footprint" first to zero and then to below zero. Unfortunately, he is lowering his footprint with a series of mostly violent crimes. Stenko's first target is in a trailer park: a giant mobile home, called The Unit by a retired farm couple, that gets about seven miles per gallon. Stenko shoots the couple, then burns The Unit. "Here's the deal," Stenko says to his next targets. "I was a hard-charger. Ambitious, ruthless, I guess.... But then I got the word from my docs.... I thought, What a selfish bastard I am. Like you two, I took and took and I never gave anything back.... Now I've got this deficit I'm trying to pay down." --Dick Adler
\ Publishers WeeklyEdgar-finalist Box's ninth novel to feature Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett begins with a bombshell: could Pickett's foster daughter, April, who apparently died six years earlier in a horrific conflagration when overzealous FBI agents confronted a group of dissident survivalists (see 2003's Winterkill), still be alive? Pickett's 17-year-old daughter, Sheridan, begins receiving disturbing text messages from someone claiming to be her dead sister, and Pickett's entire family is forced to relive the tragedy. Even worse, whoever is sending these messages is traveling cross-country with suspected serial killers targeting people whose carbon footprint is too high. Still struggling with the guilt of not protecting April from her nightmarish fate in Winterkill, Pickett vows to save her this time, no matter the cost. Powered by provocative themes of environmental activism, this relentlessly paced powder keg of a thriller could be Box's best to date. Author tour. (June)\ Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.\ \ \ \ \ Library JournalWhat would you do if a loved one began text messaging you after her death? Is someone playing a bizarre hoax on the Pickett family? Sheridan, Joe Pickett's older daughter, begins receiving text messages from someone saying she's April, the foster child killed in the Waco-style raid six years earlier (as recounted in Winterkill). "April" seems to be a hostage of a deranged ecoterrorist and his father, and they're headed straight for Wyoming. Once again, game warden Pickett plunges into the middle of a topical environmental issue, putting his and his girls' lives on the line. Wyoming's immense spaces make a fitting background for another tense thriller, with the iconic Devils Tower holding court over a frantic chase through the tangled back roads of the Black Hills. Box's series is the gold standard in the western mystery subgenre (Blood Trail), and his latest is just as addictive as the others. [See Prepub Mystery, LJ2/1/09.]\ —Teresa L. Jacobsen\ \ \ \ Kirkus ReviewsWyoming Game Warden Joe Pickett (Blood Trail, 2008, etc.) is at it again. Six years ago, April Keeley, the abandoned girl the Pickett family had taken in, died in a fiery shootout with allies of her irresponsible, litigious mother. Or did she? Suddenly Sheridan Pickett is getting text messages from someone who claims she's April, full of family details only April could know. Initially as skeptical as his daughter, Joe becomes convinced that April is alive but in grave danger once more. He'd been even more frantic if he knew that after a long string of dead-end foster homes, the 14-year-old had been rescued from a Chicago brothel by David "Stenko" Stenson, a gangster determined to show some kindness before cancer killed him, and Stenko's son Robert, a rabid environmental activist obsessed with forcing citizen polluters to buy carbon offsets, often at gunpoint. Box spices Joe's pursuit of the fast-moving Stensons and their unwilling companion with Joe's obligatory tangles with the governor's office, the FBI and his much-married mother-in-law. Basically, though, the tale is a tug-of-war between two father-figures over a young woman who isn't the daughter of either one. Though one of Box's plot twists pays off in spades, most of them don't, and the latest round of Joe's unending domestic troubles reads like soap opera. Despite incidental pleasures, this is the weakest of Joe's nine cases to date.\ \ \ \ \ The Barnes & Noble ReviewBlue Heaven, Box's previous book, was a terrific stand-alone thriller about rogue L.A. cops retired to Idaho. Below Zero is a return to the Joe Pickett series, Box's ongoing dissection of crime in Wyoming as seen through the eyes of a game warden whose favorite big game is human villains. Below Zero is the ninth Pickett book, and it could be the best one yet. Beautifully written and constructed, with an art that underplays its excitement and emotional strength, it quickly becomes personal with a phone message: "Tell Sherry April called." But April, the Picketts' foster daughter, was killed in a bloody massacre, described in Winterkill, which Joe witnessed. In subsequent calls, the girl calling herself April gives so many details of their life together that Sherry begins to believe she really is alive. Joe is still skeptical. Meanwhile, Box's amazing ability to create villains both frightening and believable kicks into high gear. An older man, Stenko, his son Robert, and a young girl (the one leaving messages and texting Sherry) are traveling across the country. Stenko's purpose is to undo the damage he's done to the environment by erasing his "carbon footprint" first to zero and then to below zero. Unfortunately, he is lowering his footprint with a series of mostly violent crimes. Stenko's first target is in a trailer park: a giant mobile home, called The Unit by a retired farm couple, that gets about seven miles per gallon. Stenko shoots the couple, then burns The Unit. "Here's the deal," Stenko says to his next targets. "I was a hard-charger. Ambitious, ruthless, I guess.... But then I got the word from my docs.... I thought, What a selfish bastard I am. Like you two, I took and took and I never gave anything back.... Now I've got this deficit I'm trying to pay down." --Dick Adler\ \
