A friend whom I see every week, and with whom I always discuss what we’re reading, has been saying pretty much the same thing for over a month: she’s reading another Joe Pickett novel by C J Box. She can’t stop. I’m not surprised: a mystery set in the Bighorn Mountains of Wyoming, centered on the plight of a valiant game warden, is right up her alley, given her taste for the Old West. What’s strange is that I couldn’t stop reading about Joe Pickett, either, once I got started.

I’ve read only one: the first, Open Season. (Amazon helpfully identifies each novel’s place in the series.) When my friend began talking about Box, I thought to myself, “Not for me!” But how could I be sure without reading one. I ought to note that my friend has proved to be a reliable source of unexpectedly good reading (eg, Terry Hayes). I decided to buy Open Season on the understanding that if I didn’t like it, I would give it to my friend, for her to pass on. I ought to note also that, because she prefers to read on an e-reader, she hasn’t got any of the books to lend. She thought that this arrangement would be very kind. I’m going to give her Open Season even though I liked it very much: I haven’t really got room for it. That’s a polite way of saying that I probably won’t want to read it again. But I did really like it, and I’m happy to know that there’s plenty more where that came from.

What worried me was that the writing would not be very good, and, to be honest, on the sentence level (as they say in writing programs), the prose of Open Season is not exactly intriguing. In a few places, it is actually leaden.

Joe walked with Wacey out to his pickup truck. Wacey stopped and stood in the dark before getting in. Wacey had brought an unopened beer with him, and Joe heard the top being unscrewed. (141)

Most of the time, however, the writing is briskly effective, and the story is told very well, even when it is plain to see where things were going. As I went through the book, I detected such evidence of wordsmith expertise as the use of “elder” (correctly) where most writers would settled for “eldest,” and a comfort with the occasional subjunctive. All things considered, I concluded that the leaden bits were intentional, and not a form of dumbing down. On the contrary, I take them to be a crutch for the reader who is addicted to skimming. The dialogue is invariably fluent; Box and his editor know what readers are likely to skip over. The series’s many fans are deserved; Box writes a lot better than several male best sellers I can think of.

And this is not a book about the Old West at all. It takes place in the Wyoming of gated billionaires, where pipeline proposals face grueling scrutiny from regulators and environmentalists, and the last phrase environmentalists want to hear is “endangered species.” Box is extremely thoughtful about the tension between the effective protection of animals by those who know what they’re doing and the interference of those who mistakenly believe that they know better. It may be that the most effective form of regulation is simply informing agents on the ground of the regulatory objectives, and to hold them responsible for implementing the best methods. And, at the same time, unionizing them in order to protect them from predatory profiteers. But there, I’ve belabored the point far more than C J Box would: he’s the more graceful critic of this problematic, anything but old-fashioned issue.