By Tom Ryan
FICTION
Battle Mountain
C.J. Box
Bloomsbury, $32.99
If you have a Lee Child section in your alphabetically arranged bookshelves, it’s time to create space ahead of it for the novels written by C.J. Box.
Child, who was born James Dover Grant, has confessed that he adopted his pen name so that his work would appear about eye level in bookshop displays. Box has been Box all his life, so there has never been any need for such strategising – and he’s always going to come before Child in bookshops.
While Child is best known for his 30 Jack Reacher novels, so far, Box’s reputation primarily rests on his 25 featuring Joe Pickett. At least in Australia, he’s not as well known as his fellow writer, although Child describes him as “one of today’s solid gold, A-list, must-read writers”. He’s also written numerous other novels, including six in the Cody Hoyt-Cassie Dewell series, which was adapted by David E. Kelley for the now-cancelled Big Sky series (all three seasons are available on Disney+). The two seasons of the equally lacklustre Joe Pickett can be found on Paramount+. Neither does justice to its literary source.
Like Child’s, Box’s books belong to the realm known as pulp fiction – a putdown label for some, a drawcard for others. Their style is straightforward – the prose is no-nonsense; the characters skilfully depicted; the locations evocatively drawn – and they keep you hooked. They rip right along. He’s the kind of writer who gives pulp a good name.
But while the two prolific authors tell stories about classic American adventurers trying to bring order to mostly out-of-the-way places in a generally troubled nation, their protagonists are very different kinds of men, although they both like doing their own thing in their own way.
While Reacher, formerly a military policeman, travels the road defiantly alone, like an old-time cowboy (he don’t need nobody, ma’am!), Joe is a Wyoming game warden who delights in being by himself in a vast mountainous wilderness. Like Reacher, he don’t go lookin’ for trouble. Still, somehow it always finds him. These are crime novels, after all.
Author - and Wyoming ranch owner - C.J. Box
But while you can’t imagine Reacher going far beyond the occasional clinch on the final page, Joe is a family man. Torn between the romance of the wild and his devotion to his wife and three daughters, he deals with the everyman stresses of being a husband and father. He worries about paying the bills, about keeping his job, about how best to manoeuvre his way past self-righteous, incompetent or plainly corrupt bureaucrats, law-enforcement officials and politicians, and how to deal with an ornery, disapproving mother-in-law.
In Battle Mountain, he’s 51, having aged along with the series since it began in 2002 with Open Season (when he was 32). Wife Marybeth, an active presence in every book, is now the director of the Twelve Sleep County Library, her research expertise regularly assisting Joe’s investigations. And the little girls who sat on his knee in the early books are now young women making their ways in the world, away from home, their situations periodically foregrounded.
Box’s books can be read as stand-alone stories, but the series works best as a chronologically ordered account of Joe’s life, the characters around him, and the changing face of rural America.
Unlike Reacher, Joe is a stickler for the rules and his “Dudley-Do-Right reputation” precedes him wherever he goes. That he is an honourable man can readily be seen in how he goes about his work and his life. When he comes across the state governor fishing without a licence in one of the early books, he tickets him the same way he would anybody else. When interviewing somebody he suspects of stepping out of line, he’s learnt that a friendly opening – “I guess you know why I’m here?” – is far more effective than a confrontation. He has a special dislike for trophy hunters, poachers, eco-terrorists and those who hunt out of season.
Again unlike Reacher, he’s not skilled in the martial arts. He’s not even a good shot when he grudgingly finds himself forced to take up arms, and he always needs help when the serious shooting starts. Which is where master falconer, former special forces operative and survivalist Nate Romanowski comes in. Introduced in Winter Kill (2003), he serves more or less the same function as Reacher does in Child’s books. When he’s accused of a crime he didn’t commit, Joe stands by him, winning his undying loyalty.
Simmering away beneath the surfaces of the stories is Box’s dismay with the peculiarly American chaos that is also known as the state of the nation: the dangerous secret organisations festering around the fringes of its everyday life; the corrupt public officialdom that tarnishes its democracy; the plight of army veterans who’ve been exploited in hopeless foreign incursions; the hostility to migrants. In Battle Mountain, Marybeth’s online investigations reveal that an FBI agent who has been asking after Joe and Nate had been engaged in several significant domestic terrorist events that have remained unhealed wounds on the American psyche (and that include the January 6 riots in the nation’s capital).
Nate is at the heart of the new book. Joe doesn’t appear until page 51, although he and Marybeth are still central to the plot. Nate is bent on tracking down and wreaking vengeance upon Axel Soledad, a fellow special forces soldier gone rogue, who first appears in Shadows Reel (2022), and has been lying in wait ever since.
As Box calmly and capably winds together the various plot threads, events unfold in a savage terrain littered with small towns, isolated farmhouses and shacks, and a tourist haven for privileged easterners known as the B-Lazy-U Ranch. At stake is what is described early on as not just a threat to the characters but dangers that could “possibly alter the trajectory of the nation itself”. And like most of the preceding books in the series, it’s unputdownable.
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