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Joe Pickett is the new game warden in Twelve Sleep, Wyoming, a town where nearly everyone hunts and the game warden—especially one like Joe who won't take bribes or look the other way—is far from popular. When he finds a local hunting outfitter dead, splayed out on the woodpile behind his state-owned home, he takes it personally. There had to be a reason that the outfitter, with whom he's had run-ins before, chose his backyard, his woodpile to die in. Even after the "outfitter murders," as they have been dubbed by the local press after the discovery of the two more bodies, are solved, Joe continues to investigate, uneasy with the easy explanation offered by the local police.
As Joe digs deeper into the murders, he soon discovers that the outfitter brought more than death to his backdoor: he brought Joe an endangered species, thought to be extinct, which is now living in his woodpile. But if word of the existence of this endangered species gets out, it will destroy any chance of InterWest, a multi-national natural gas company, building an oil pipeline that would bring the company billions of dollars across Wyoming, through the mountains and forests of Twelve Sleep. The closer Joe comes to the truth behind the outfitter murders, the endangered species and InterWest, the closer he comes to losing everything he holds dear.
(Summary provided by C.J. Box)
C. J. Box is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of 30 novels including the Joe Pickett series. He won the Edgar Alan Poe Award for Best Novel (Blue Heaven, 2009) as well as the Anthony Award, Prix Calibre 38 (France), the Maltese Falcon Award (Japan), the Macavity Award, the Gumshoe Award, two Barry Awards, and the 2010 Mountains & Plains Independent Booksellers Association Award for fiction. He was recently awarded the 2016 Western Heritage Award for Literature by the National Cowboy Museum as well as the Spur Award for Best Contemporary Novel by the Western Writers of America in 2017. Over ten million copies of his books have been sold in the U.S. and abroad and they’ve been translated into 27 languages. Two television series based on his novels are in production (BIG SKY on ABC and JOE PICKETT on Spectrum Originals and Paramount+). He is an Executive Producer for both series.
Three-Inch Teeth, the 24th Joe Pickett novel, was published in February of 2024 and debuted at #2 on the New York Times Bestseller list and #1 on the Apple Ebooks Bestseller list.
Box is a Wyoming native and has worked as a ranch hand, surveyor, fishing guide, a small town newspaper reporter and editor, and he owned an international tourism marketing firm with his wife Laurie. In 2008, Box was awarded the "BIG WYO" Award from the state tourism industry. An avid outdoorsman, Box has hunted, fished, hiked, ridden, and skied throughout Wyoming and the Mountain West. He served on the Board of Directors for the Cheyenne Frontier Days Rodeo and the Wyoming Office of Tourism. They have three daughters and four grandchildren. He and his wife Laurie live on their ranch in Wyoming.
The Joe Pickett Novels: Open Season (2001), Savage Run (2002), Winterkill (2003), Trophy Hunt (2004), Out of Range (2005), In Plain Sight (2006), Free Fire (2007), Blood Trail (2008), Below Zero (2009), Nowhere to Run (2010), Cold Wind (2011), Force of Nature (2012), Breaking Point (2013), Stone Cold(2014), Endangered (2015), Off The Grid (2016), Vicious Circle (2017), The Disappeared (2018), Wolf Pack (2019), Long Range (2020), Dark Sky (2021), Shadows Reel (2022), Three Inch Teeth (2024).
The Cody Hoyt/Cassie Dewell and Stand Alone Novels: Blue Heaven (2008), Three Weeks to Say Goodbye (2009), Back of Beyond(2011), The Highway (2013), Badlands (2015), Paradise Valley (2017), The Bitterroots (2019), and Treasure State (2022).
Short Stories: Shots Fired: Stories From Joe Pickett Country (2014).
(Biography provided by C.J. Box)
Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett has now been the protagonist in more than twenty novels, starting with Open Season in 2001. Over that time, he’s taken on environmental terrorists, rogue federal land managers, animal mutilators, crazed cowboy hitmen, corrupt bureaucrats, homicidal animal rights advocates, and violent dysfunctional families. Joe has matured, lost some of his innocence and naïveté, and committed acts that continue to haunt him. But through it all, he has remained true to himself and his family. And even when he knows that pursuing justice will bring the community, state, and his superiors down on his head, well… he just can’t help it.
About Joe, the New York Times once wrote, “…Box introduced us to his unlikely hero, a game warden named Joe Pickett, a decent man who lives paycheck to paycheck and who is deeply fond of his wife and his three daughters. Pickett isn't especially remarkable except for his honesty and for a quality that Harold Bloom attributes to Shakespeare -- the ability to think everything through for himself.” I still like that. I’ve been surprised and gratified how the character of Joe Pickett has resonated with readers across the country and around the world.
The character of Joe Pickett is, in a way, the antithesis of many modern literary protagonists. He's happily married with a growing family of daughters. He doesn't arrive with excess emotional baggage, or a dark past that haunts him. He works hard and tries, sincerely, to "do the right thing." He doesn't talk much. He’s a lousy shot. He's human, and real, which means he sometimes screws up.
Game wardens are unique because they can legitimately be involved in just about every major event or situation that involves the outdoors and the rough edges of the rural new west. They're trained and armed law enforcement officers, and nearly every human they encounter in the field is armed, which is unique. Often, they’re too far from town to call backup in an emergency so they’re forced to deal with situations with their experience, weapons, and wits. Their districts can encompass 5,000 square miles of rough country filled with wildlife, history, schemes, and secrets. By necessity, they’re lone wolves.
I've ridden on patrol with game wardens to try and get it right. I think I have, because the novels and the character have been embraced by the game wardens themselves (as well as their long-suffering wives). I try hard to portray their lives accurately, and in 2005 I received a certificate of appreciation from the Wyoming Game Warden Association. My novels have won quite a few awards over the years, but that one is very special.
When I think of Joe Pickett, I don’t think of an action hero, or a smooth operator, or an actor. I always picture him as he is: a western archetype -- briefly described in the novels only as “lean and of medium height” -- alone in his pickup truck, accompanied by his dog or perhaps his sidekick Nate Romanowski, perched on a mountain under a huge blue sky, contemplating hundreds of miles of raw Wyoming landscape laid out in front of him.
Real world experiences provide the background for Joe Pickett novels. While working on ranches and exploration survey crews, I learned first-hand about the beauty, cruelty, and balance of the natural world. The land itself - the environment - plays a major role in all the Joe Pickett novels. That's because the land in the Rocky Mountain west dominates day-to-day existence. The fight over that land provides the conflict and the stories. This fight has economic, ideological, historical, and theological overtones. It's a serious fight with enormous consequences.
Joe doesn’t enter every fight with an agenda other than to do the right thing. It’s his fatal flaw. Wish him luck.
(Information about Joe Pickett provided by C.J. Box)
