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Critics' Opinion:
Readers' Opinion:
First Published:
May 2003, 384 pages
Paperback:
Jul 2004, 352 pages
Steeped in the sharp cliffs and the brutal wilderness of the Wyoming landscape, this is a masterful performance - a darkly compelling and utterly unforgettable classic mystery.
It's an hour away from darkness with a bitter winter storm raging when Joe Pickett finds himself deep in the forest edging Battle Mountain, shotgun in his left hand, his truck's steering wheel handcuffed to his right--and Lamar Gardiner's arrow-riddled corpse splayed against the tree in front of him.
Lamar's murder and the sudden onslaught of the snowstorm warns: Get off the mountain. But Joe knows this episode is far from over. Somewhere in the dense timber, a killer draws back his bowstring--with Joe as his prey.
Joe's pursuit of the killer through the rugged mountains that surround the snow-packed town of Saddlestring takes a horrifying turn when his beloved foster daughter is kidnapped. Now it's personal--and Joe will stop at nothing to get her back.
Steeped in the sharp cliffs and the brutal wilderness of the Wyoming landscape, Winterkill is a masterful performance, darkly compelling and utterly unforgettable. C. J. Box places all the elements of a classic mystery in a setting where the dangerous beauty of one of America's last frontiers plays accomplice to the darkest of human motives.
win·ter·kill [wíntr kìl ] vti
to die, or cause a plant, animal, fish, or other living being/organism to die, from lack of adequate protection from winter weather conditions
Chapter One
Twelve Sleep County, Wyoming
A storm was coming to the Bighorn Mountains.
It was late December, four days before Christmas, the last week of the elk hunting season. Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett was in his green four-wheel drive pickup, parked just below the tree line in the southern Wolf range. The terrain he was patrolling was an enormous wooded bowl, and Joe was just below the eastern rim. The sea of dark pines in the bowl was interspersed with ancient clear-cuts and mountain meadows, and set off by knuckle-like granite ridges that defined each small drainage. Beyond the rim to the west was Battle Mountain, separated from the Wolf range by Crazy Woman Creek, which flowed, eventually, into the Twelve Sleep River.
It was two hours away from nightfall, but the sky ...
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