It seems like only yesterday I finished Free Fire, the previous instalment of the Joe Pickett series.  That’s because, at time of writing, it was.  I remember my maternal grandmother once holding forth on the joy of finding an author with a rich back catalogue to delve into.  Regular visitors to us here at Bookgeeks will know by now that 2011 has brought me that particular joy, in the form of CJ Box.

Blood Trail is the eighth in the Pickett series.  Joe, having passed the big four-oh, is still to be found working without portfolio for Spencer Rulon, the maverick governor of the state of Wyoming.  Predictably enough, when trouble rears its head, Rulon calls upon Joe, together with a horde of other law enforcement officers, to investigate.  Said trouble takes the form of a murdered hunter found in the woods, eviscerated, skinned and decapitated in an apparent nod to the preparation of game animals.  The evidence suggests the work of anti-hunting extremists, a theory which gains credence when a prominent anti-hunting campaigner throws himself into the mix.

In a break from the norm, Box spends several chapters writing as the killer, and in the first person.  A master of the outdoor arts, the killer provides a fascinating description of how to track prey, sparing no detail and yet never seeming heavy-handed with the facts.  Through the killer, and to a similar extent, through Pickett, Nate Romanowski and some of the tertiary characters, man’s primal abilities are brought to the fore.  In his typically non-prejudicial way, Box reminds us man is also an animal; adversaries sense each others’ presence without apparent reference to any of the canonical five senses, blood and sweat can be smelt before they are seen, and sounds can be heard clearly across vast spaces.  These are not superhuman characters though, rather they simply retain the skills lost by most of the species during the flight to city living, with its cramped apartment blocks and pre-packed dinners.

Unsurprisingly, this is critical to the major issue explored in the book.  The anti-hunting movement characterise hunters as drunken, Bambi-killing slobs; while Pickett and the more refined hunters see themselves as part of a natural order greater than themselves, helping prevent overpopulation and subsequent mass starvation.

As ever, Don Corleone’s old observation holds true, that a man who doesn’t spend time with his family can never be a real man.  Though his new role regularly takes him far from home, Pickett strives to be around his wife and daughters as often as possible.  Through the Pickett clan’s entirely authentic family life, with its extramarital temptations and financial hardships, we are reminded that the jeopardy Joe faces is not just about whether he lives or dies (and the existence of at least two more Pickett books after this one are a dead giveaway on that score), but about what form his life will take.  Cast out from his job, in peril from marauding killers and henpecked by miserable suburbanite neighbours, life for Pickett is never simple, and victory is never assured.  All this serves to give great credibility to a tale set in rural Wyoming, but whose body count wouldn’t look out of place in the Rampart patrol area of the LAPD.

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