New West Book Review

Wyoming’s Wind Farms Stir the Plot in C.J. Box’s New Novel

By Jenny Shank, 3-21-11

Cold Wind
by C.J. Box
Putnam, 400 pages, $25.95

Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett’s long-simmering resentment against his intolerable mother-in-law, the notorious gold digger Missy Vankueren Longbrake Alden, comes to a boil in Cold Wind, the eleventh novel in C.J. Box‘s popular mystery series. Pickett is too much of a chivalrous, white-hat-wearing cowboy type to ever retaliate against his mother-in-law for her years of belittlement—but in Cold Wind, he is seriously tempted to. As Cold Wind opens, Missy’s fifth husband turns up murdered in a spectacular fashion: shot and hanging from one of the 250-foot turbines on his wind farm. When police discover the murder weapon in Missy’s car and she is arrested for the crime, Pickett is inclined to stay out of the case.

Box’s Joe Pickett novels often open with a description of a dead game animal, illegally poached, that Pickett must trace to a culprit and beyond that to further misdeeds. Cold Wind‘s introduction of a human body instead at the beginning sets the tone for the plot, which won’t involve much game warden action from Pickett.

Pickett is tempted to leave Missy to her own devices when she lands in jail—she’s endlessly made fun of his occupation, and she conducts her life in the most selfish possible manner, accruing land by marrying and disposing of husbands. Missy and her most recent husband, “multi-millionaire developer and media mogul Earl Alden,” became the largest landholders in northern Wyoming when they married. “Joe couldn’t stand [Missy],” Box writes, “and she still wondered out loud why her favorite daughter—the one with pluck and promise—had stuck with that game warden all these years.”

Pickett loves Missy’s daughter, too—his wife, Marybeth—and that is why he ultimately decides to begin his own investigation into the murder of Earl Alden. He is also suspicious of how overly simple the prosecution’s case against Missy seems—their theory is that Alden planned to divorce her, so she shot him and left the murder weapon in her car. Why then did she hoist him hundreds of feet in the air, and how was the petite Missy capable of that, Pickett wonders. He seeks the answer in the many enemies Alden made in his energy business dealings. As much as Pickett hates his mother-in-law—at one point he sees Missy without makeup and thinks, “her mouth was thin and wrinkled vertically, which reminded Joe of the stitched mouth of an Amazonian shrunken skull"—he is too dedicated to his wife and to the desire to see the correct person in jail to refrain from investigating.

Meanwhile, Pickett’s estranged friend Nate Romanowski, a falconer and master assassin, is hiding out in his home in a remote cave when the widow of one of his past victims hires two buffoons to try to kill him. The grim results of this subplot will tie Nate’s interests to a figure Pickett is seeking in the Alden murder case, and bring Nate temporarily out of seclusion.

Box’s use of clear-cut villains—such as the horrid Missy, the Jackson-based blowhard defense lawyer she hires, the bumbling Sheriff McLanahan, the ditzy status and shopping-obsessed widow from Chicago who suddenly becomes an efficient man hunter, and the two rent-a-cowboy-type drinking and whoring idiots she hires to kill Nate—is standard for genre fiction.

What makes Cold Wind enjoyable for those who are interested in more nuance in their reading material is its evocation of Wyoming’s land, politics, people, and their values. (It’s probably a safe bet that more Wyomingites recognize themselves and their neighbors in the characters in Box’s work than in Annie Proulx’s books.) Box weaves the history of wind farms in Wyoming and the political machinations that contributed to their rapid growth into his plot in an entertaining way.  Marybeth, Joe and their daughters—one of whom leaves for college in Cold Wind, and another of whom is in the throes of teenage dramatics—share a depth of characterization that grounds the story.

Often when Box paints his characters in broad strokes, it’s for the purposes of welcome comic relief. Perhaps the funniest character in Cold Wind is Shamazz, a.k.a. Bud Junior, the ne’er-do-well son of Bud Longbrake, Pickett ‘s former father-in-law. Shamazz “was a thirty-three-year-old college student at the University of Montana in Missoula whose prime interest was performance art on Higgins Street wearing a jester costume inspired by the French court at Versailles.” As everybody knows, living in Missoula will do that to you. Shamazz isn’t happy to see Joe when they run into each other, telling him, “I hated you, too, man. Dudley Do-Right cracker and your white bread cookie-cutter family.”

Two people describe Pickett as “Dudley Do-Right” in Cold Wind, and it’s his upstanding nature that ultimately proves to be his undoing. Someone who knows Pickett ‘s honest and forthright ways well will end up exploiting these qualities, but not before Cold Wind gives the reader a diverting ride.

C.J. Box will tour the region behind Cold Wind, with stops in Laramie (March 22, American Heritage Center, 1 p.m.), Cheyenne (March 22, Barnes & Noble, 7 p.m.), Denver (March 23, Murder By The Book, 5 p.m., Tattered Cover (Colfax), 7:30 p.m.), Ft. Collins (April 4, Old Firehouse Books, 7 p.m.), and more. The complete tour is here.

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