April - In Plain Sight

I love how C.J. splits up his book besides the chapters.  This will make my postings even better.  This book is broken up by months.

The beginning of the book In Plain Sight, the sixth in the years begins in the month of April.  Now given that this part of the book only has seven chapters, quite a bit happens in that time frame and all of it makes you want to just keep reading to find out what part each character will carry out in the rest of the book.

As you all know these books take place in Twelve Sleep County, Wyoming.  One of the local ranch owners, Opal Scarlett vanishes.  No one knows what happened to her and I really don't think that very many people care, in fact, they are happy.  She owns a pretty large ranch in Twelve Sleep and this ranch backed up to a river.  In response to her disappearance has caused all kinds of hiatus amongst her three sons, well really only two as the other is oblivious to it all.  Every spring and summer, guides would come down the river in their boats with customers and they would show  them the best parts of the river to fish.  Well, Miss Opal thought that she would make some money off of all of these guides.  She would charge them a fee to go down the river.  She new that it was illegal to do so.  As quoted from the book, "it was perfectly legal for anyone to float in a boat through private land as long as the boaters didn't stop and get out or pull the boat up to shore and trespass.  The land belonged to the landowner, but the river belonged to the public."  It was okay for the landowner to charge a fee for access to the river over the private property, but as I stated, it was illegal to charge for simply floating through private land.  So in order for her to bide by the law, she would stand on the bank near her home and cry out as if she was in trouble.  The guides would pull over and get out to see what was wrong and she would collect her fee for coming onto her land.  She would charge anywhere from $5 to $20 per person in each boat.  It was said that she collected enough money from the float fees, she would buy herself a new Cadillac at the end of every summer.  Now that is a lot of money.  Anyway, that is just one big part of the puzzle of this book.

Another part of the puzzle is a guy by the name of John Wayne Keeley.  He is making a trek from down south all the way up to Wyoming as he has some unsettled business to take care of.  He stole a car from Georgia to get to a penitentiary in Rawlins, Wyoming where he manages to kill someone with some tobacco laced with pesticide, steals a truck from an eldery couple all in hopes to find one person, Joe Pickett.

Now like I said, April was a pretty busy month with one person taken into custody for the disappearance for Opal Scarlett as he claims that he threw her in the river after she tied a piece of wire across the river slicing his neck open to get even with some of the guides going down river without paying their so called, "floaters fees."

Now we do learn in chapter 7 that the guy killed in prison, Wacey Hedeman was also the same guy that shot Joe's wife in the stomach back in the first novel by C. J. Box.

Can't wait to see how all these different pieces of the puzzle come together in the end.

Time tells all

We all know that when you watch a movie or read a good book, there are always new characters that are introduced.  Some are good, funny, interesting, while others we know are going to throw a monkey wrench in the story line.  There were several new characters brought into this story mixed in with the other mishaps and mysterious happens makes you wonder if they are good or evil.  Reading this book, I was always second guessing if they were part of the scheme of the story or what.  Well, let me tell you, it was awesome trying to figure that out. 

We all have had our moments of good and bad days with our jobs.  Well, I can guarantee with all the ups and downs and mysterious happenings in Joe’s work in a matter of a week makes our bad days seem like a cake walk.  Let’s see, where do I begin.  Of course he tries to really figure what is behind the suggested suicide of the former game warden, who is lurking around outside the statehouse that he is staying at, why is he feeling like he is in a fog lately?  Well, as you would guess it all leads up to a surprising ending as well as some shocking and some not so shocking.  He was in Jackson Hole, Wyoming for about a week and in that time he managed to shoot and kill someone, figure out who killed, that’s right killed the game warden, and who was poisoning him the same way they did the former game warden.  Once again, like most murders, there is an ulterior motive, all so a group of business guys can build houses on a huge plot of land for rich people can live on, raise their own elk, deer, etc, and do their own kill.  That is so far unnatural that I am on Joe’s side for not allowing this to happen, not that it would have happened anyway as everyone is bound to get caught under Joe’s watch.  Now how is that for all in a day’s or in Joe’s case, week’s work.  This was a really good book and each one of his books keeps getting better and better.  I can’t wait to start reading the next book in the series to see what kind of trouble or shall I say murder, Joe solves.  Being that he was asked if he was going to come back to Jackson Hole, will hopefully be answered in the next book.  Only words will tell.