Nowhere to Run is the tenth in the Joe Pickett series, and after a decade of writing (condensed to twelve months for those of us in the UK), author CJ Box is in no danger of running out of steam.

The tale begins in the Sierra Madre mountains.  Following reports of butchered elk and damaged tents, Joe is running one last check on the area prior to leaving for good after a year in enforced exile. As he rides deeper into the wilderness, Joe is filled with a sense of foreboding and a desire to turn back, and with good reason; his journey soon finds him in more danger than ever before.

I’m paraphrasing the blurb here, but this is no mere empty sales pitch.  Over the last few books, Pickett has faced homicidal millionaires, Chicago gangsters and a fairly broad cross-section of expert hunters, but in Nowhere to Run, his adversary is more formidable than all of the above.  Rather than mark his arrival in double figures by going through the motions, Box raises the bar here like the master craftsman his work, and my plethora of appropriately fawning reviews, have always suggested him to be.

Politics has always been key to Box’s books, with government agencies spending as much time fighting each other as fighting crime, Joe’s career path being dictated by the electioneering of the state Governor, and Nate Romanowski’s fate constantly in the balance dependent on his usefulness to the authorities.  In Nowhere to Run, Box takes it a step further.  At heart, this is still an environmental book like all the author’s others; the Wyoming countryside is as lavishly depicted as ever, and the underlying message is clear; the forests and mountains will still be standing when the impermanent whims of individual humans are long forgotten.  However, the controversy that drives Nowhere to Run is a political one, focussing on the rights of the government with regards to the individual.

By extension, this book may be less universal than its nine predecessors.  In the US, at least the US seen through the prism of British media, there seems to be a growing groundswell of anti-taxation sentiment, as though currency is appropriated by the federal government for the sole purpose of being burned on an open fire to keep Washington bureaucrats warm at night.  To a European audience, the rugged individualism bordering on (true) anarchism espoused by some characters may be baffling; it certainly was to me.

That aside, Nowhere to Run bears all the hallmarks I’ve come to know and love.  The Pickett family is as complex as ever, and (spoiler alert for anyone who hasn’t yet read Below Zero) riddled with conflict since the return of April, the foster daughter thought dead.  During her absence, has matured in the most traumatic ways possible, and brings with her an attitude and problems that make the sororal bickering of previous outings look positively idyllic.  Joe’s relationship with Nate Romanowski becomes ever more complicated, always characterised by mutual respect and gratitude, but tested here by their divergent beliefs on the central issue of the book.

One of the joys of the whole series, felt particularly strongly in Nowhere to Run, is its own internal consistency.  Being careful not to leave new readers in the dark, Box references his other works time and again, building plausibility through the coherence of the events from book to book (or year to year).  The Pickett series is not a saga that needs to be approached in whole and from the beginning (I myself still have to read the first four), but they do form a rich tapestry which is a great pleasure to behold.  Indeed, my one frustration as I grow closer to dragging myself up-to-date is that soon I’ll be forced into spending full calendar years waiting for the next Pickett to hit my doormat.  Truly, the Pickett series is one good thing I can’t have too much of.

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