For quite some time, I’ve seen C.J. Box books come up in a list of suggested books I’d like based on my reading history. I kept meaning to check them out, but with so many other books in line already I kept putting it off. Fortunately, just about the entire series is available on Audible with the plan I have. In between some of the longer non-fiction books I read, I decided these would be great to listen to.

Open Season is the first book in Box’s Joe Pickett series. Published in 2001, Joe is a young Wyoming Game Warden with a wife and two daughters, and a third child on the way. Joe is a straight-shooter but has had a few misadventures, including having his service revolver taken from him when he confronted a local poacher. Later on, that same individual turns up dead in Joe’s backyard.

What seems like a cut-and-dried case of poachers turning on each other ends up being something much more. Open Season follows Joe as he uncovers a conspiracy to hide the existence of a weasel once thought to be extinct and allow a pipeline to be built right through where they live. Greed is a motivating factor as Joe realizes the people he looked up to and thought were his friends aren’t who they seem to be.

I haven’t listened to many relatively short fiction books on audio as I usually prefer to read them, but this was available. I have to say the performance was great. Narrator David Chandler does a great job with the material, giving inflections in his voice to instill a bit of drama when needed, while not overtaking the story.

The story itself is fantastic. Box conveys that Joe is a young, struggling game warden who is struggling with his place in the world. The background of his relationship with his wife is good, giving the feel of a relationship where he appreciates her but is on edge that he’s not good enough for her. It’s quite obvious he deeply loves his family without hitting the reader over the head with sappy moments. Joe isn’t superhuman, which also makes him a compelling protagonist. He screws up on a regular basis, but he also learns as he goes along. His screw-ups have ramifications mostly on him and also makes him more relatable.

The mystery at the heart of Open Season is a good one too, even if I had a pretty good idea of what was going on early in the book. The debate I had was how big the conspiracy was. It seems like it could go all the way to the state house. That part kept me guessing all the way through. Joe seems to sit somewhere in the middle between big business and the environmentalists. He sees the big picture, but at the same time knows what his job is. He generally follows the law, even if he doesn’t agree with it all the time. It reminds me quite a bit of Paul Doiron’s series about Maine Game Warden Mike Bowditch.

Overall, Open Season is a terrific book. I’ll definitely be continuing with the series. The characters are compelling as is the setting. It’ll be interesting to see where Joe and his family go from here.

Next book in the series: