The Crossroads

Box's predictable latest thriller featuring Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett (after Battle Mountain) puts Joe's daughters center stage. At the outset, Joe's wife Marybeth gets a call from a hunter informing her that a bullet-riddled Game and Fish vehicle, possibly Joe's, was spotted on an isolated road with somebody inside. Joe is soon identified as the victim, and his wounds, including a traumatic brain injury, have left him in a coma. While Joe recovers, his adult daughters Sheridan, April, and Lucy set out to find his assailants. Box identifies the culprits early on as a pair of dim-witted guns-for-hire named Dorn Peddy and James Dale O'Bryan but keeps the identity of the person who hired them a mystery. Unfortunately, Peddy and O'Bryan prove to be uninspiring antagonists, and Joe's daughters aren't particularly competent sleuths, taking far too long to identify the mastermind behind the assassination plot. This will leave series fans longing for Pickett's glory days. Agent: Ann Rittenberg, Ann Rittenberg Literary. (Feb.)

Wyoming Game and Fish Warden Joe Pickett has been shot plenty of times before. But this time may be the last. As Joe hovers between life and death in a Billings hospital, Box indicates that Dorn Peddy and James Dale O'Bryan are the two men who ambushed him, shot him, and left him for dead. But he doesn't reveal who hired them or why. That's left up to Joe's three daughters: bird-abatement firm chief executive Sheridan, Bozeman private eye April, and University of Wyoming undergrad Lucy. Since the man who reported the incident to the Twelve Sleep County Sheriff's Department has disappeared, the most that newly appointed Sheriff Steve Sondergard can do is to warn Sheridan and her sisters away from the case. But the fact that both the shooters and the witness seem to have come from one of exactly three places presents an obvious appeal to the younger Picketts, who plan to each visit one place and question the owners simultaneously before they can warn each other that anyone's coming. The only problem is that all the possible suspects--billionaire Michael Thompson and his wife, Brandy, of the Double Diamond Ranch; ranchers John and Shelby Bucholz, of the Bucholz Cattle Company; and secretive sisters Lisa and Lainie McElwee, of McElwee Land and Cattle Ranch--act equally guilty. As Box unspools a series of flashbacks showing what Joe was up to in the weeks before the ambush, one question assumes paramount importance: Can Joe's daughters identify which of them is behind the plot to murder their father before the hired gunmen visit the hospital and try again? More than any of his earlier cases, the comatose hero's 26th adventure bears the hallmarks of a formal detective story. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.