Blood Trail (Joe Pickett Series #8) by C. J. Box

From Barnes & Noble

During elk hunting season, hikers in the Rockies can often hear distant shooters practicing their elk calls. This year, the mountains are quieter; the governor canceled the shooting season after game wardens found a hunter shot, strung up, gutted, beheaded, and flayed. Rumors spread quickly that a psychopathic anti-hunting activist is loose in the woods. As more bodies are found, horror rips through the hills, and the governor pressures Joe Pickett to stop carnage somehow, anyway he can. The eighth Joe Pickett novel is a corker.

From the Publisher

Game wardens have found a man dead at a mountain camp-strung up, gutted, and flayed as if he were the elk he'd been hunting. Is the murder the work of a deranged anti-hunting activist or of a lone psychopath with a personal vendetta? Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett is the man to track the murderer and stop him before someone declares open season on humans.

Booklist

Box sets the standards so high with his Joe Pickett series. . . . Box is a master at working New West issues into his stories . . . exploring pro and con arguments without missing a storytelling beat . . . he's forged a perfect alloy of familiar and fresh. . . . Once again, recommended for practically everybody.

New York Times Book Review

Praise for C. J. Box's Free Fire "Joe doesn't let us down, leading us on an exhilarating tour. . . .

Publishers Weekly

Box's disappointing eighth installment of the celebrated Joe Pickett series is a suspenseful journey which casts our hero in a brutal murder investigation that may lead to his own demise. David Chandler reads with great dedication and clarity to the tale, but he is simply not Joe Pickett. Chandler's voice is that of a Broadway star, not a Wyoming game warden, and the story suffers because of it. There is no attempt at even the slightest mid-western dialect here; Chandler drones on and on in a monotone voice that is more likely to put listeners to bed than at the edge of their seats. When the narrator seems less than enthused with a story, the audience stands no chance. A Putnam hardcover (Reviews, Mar. 17).
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Jo Ann Vicarel - Library Journal

When a hunter is butchered in Wyoming, game warden Joe Pickett and his boss, Randy Pope, set off to investigate. Soon, it becomes clear that someone is systematically killing hunters. Caught between the people who hunt and those who are opposed to hunting, not to mention facing one of the most dangerous cases of his career, Pickett must find a way to bring the killer to justice before more deaths occur. Award-winning mystery writer Box ratchets up the suspense in this tightly plotted example of his writing genius, his eighth thriller to feature Pickett. His sense of place and talent for character development are on a par with those of James Lee Burke. Highly recommended. [See Prepub Mystery, LJ1/08.]

Kirkus Reviews

Wyoming Game and Fish Warden Joe Pickett (Free Fire, 2007, etc.), once again at the governor's behest, stalks the wraithlike figure who's targeting elk hunters for death. Frank Urman was taken down by a single rifle shot, field-dressed, beheaded and hung upside-down to bleed out. (You won't believe where his head eventually turns up.) The poker chip found near his body confirms that he's the third victim of the Wolverine, a killer whose animus against hunters is evidently being whipped up by anti-hunting activist Klamath Moore. The potential effects on the state's hunting revenues are so calamitous that Governor Spencer Rulon pulls out all the stops, and Pickett is forced to work directly with Wyoming Game and Fish Director Randy Pope, the boss who fired him from his regular job in Saddlestring District. Three more victims will die in rapid succession before Joe is given a more congenial colleague: Nate Romanowski, the outlaw falconer who pledged to protect Joe's family before he was taken into federal custody. As usual in this acclaimed series, the mystery is slight and its solution eminently guessable long before it's confirmed by testimony from an unlikely source. But the people and scenes and enduring conflicts that lead up to that solution will stick with you for a long time. More of a western than a mystery, like most of Joe's adventures, and all the better for the open physical clashes that periodically release the tension between the scheming adversaries. Agent: Ann Rittenberg/Ann Rittenberg Literary Agency

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