You could hardly do better for a different kind of read in the action adventure genre of fiction than pick up a book by author C. J. Box, who has to date penned more than a dozen novels, ten of which star Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett. What stands out in these books is the author's fine writing style with its plainspoken narrative and a tempo which perfectly matches the rural characters of the Mountain West. Practically everything about these stories are different, including the isolated locales and Pickett's unusual profession as a game warden for Wyoming's "Twelve Sleep County." In Joe Pickett the author has melded or matched the urban private investigator to the mythic ideals and the rugged individualism of the Western cowboy. 

As C. J. Box describes his hero, "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 does not 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."

Box goes on to say, "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.  ... Joe doesn’t enter every fight with an agenda other than to do the right thing. It’s his fatal flaw. Wish him luck."

We don't think of job of a game warden as being all that dangerous or interesting, but Box quickly goes out of his way to dissuade us of this notion. "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."

Box leaps into this fertile field of unplowed literary possibilities with bravado, realism, and consequence. His novels, most particularly his debut 2001 novel, "Open Season," have won a slew of coveted awards including the Anthony, Macavity, Gumshoe, and Barry awards. He has also been an Edgar Award and a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist. During the past decade he has averaged about a book a year. A Wyoming native, Box serves on the board of directors for Cheyenne Frontier Days Rodeo. Needless to say, the real world game wardens have taken Joe Pickett to their heart and have given Box a special award of their own.

"Savage Run" begins not with a Joe Pickett vignette, but with a scene describing environmental activist Stewie Woods, cofounder of the One Globe environmental group, celebrating his marriage to Annabel Bellotti by spending their honeymoon spiking trees to protect them from loggers. The two had only known each other for a few days in a whirlwind romance that found Stewie giddy with joy after tripping, literally, over her naked body while fleeing through the woods from an angry gunman. Annabel, a recent divorcee out on a camping trip, thinks that her romance with a well-known environmental outlaw wanted for innumerable acts of vandalism against private property is the neatest adventure ever.

They find a retired judge in Ennis, Montana, to marry them. What they don't know is that Judge Ace Cooper, a man bitter over having lost his own family ranch years before, secretly reports having married Stewie Woods to an unknown confederate. He also passes along the information that they are heading over to a small town called Saddlestring in the Bighorn Mountains. Stewie, who revels in being an "ecoterrorist," spends the spare time of his honeymoon with Annabel spiking trees in a vast mountainous woodland where cattle ranches blend into government property and the cattle graze wherever they please. 

In the course of searching for new trees to spike, they wander through a meadow and see a small herd of cattle grazing. Strangely, one lone cow is caught on a rope, so they go to rescue it. They get close before they realize that the cow is a booby trap laden with high powered explosives which suddenly explode with enough force to disintegrate almost everything in the area. The meadow with its newly opened gaping hole quickly becomes a crime scene and the state police along with Joe Pickett, the county game warden, sift the area for clues. 

In reporting the murders to landowner Jim Finotta, a powerful local rancher and the owner of the V Bar U Ranch, Joe finds it strange that Finotta fails even to question him over the loss of his cattle, a valuable commodity to any rancher. 2002, Berkley Publishing, a division of Penguin Putnam, Inc., 304 pages.