"London has its Sherlock Homes...but Wyoming has Joe Pickett."

London has its Sherlock Holmes, France has its Inspector Maigret, and Botswana has its Precious Ramotswe; but Wyoming has Joe Pickett.

Pickett, the game warden in the popular mystery series by C.J. Box, is not a traditional literary sleuth—you won’t find locked-room puzzles, deep psychological investigations into the criminal character, or big-reveal climaxes a la Agatha Christie. No, Joe Pickett is just an ordinary man doing his job. You’ll have to forgive him if he gets excited when, every now and then, he stumbles across a corpse in the backcountry.

He’s one of fifty-five game wardens in Wyoming, but he works in virtual solitude—just Joe, his horse, his rifle, and all that wilderness. In Winterkill, we’re told, “The job of a Wyoming game warden was supposed to consist of one-third public contact, one-third harvest collection, and one-third law enforcement.” In Box’s novels, those percentages tilt heavily toward the latter.

Lately, the Equality State has been seeing a surge of mysteries set within the confines of its square borders: Craig Johnson, Margaret Cole, Lise McClendon and Virginia Swift are just a few of the popular novelists who plunk their detectives in the middle of sagebrush and mountains. What sets Box’s books apart, however, is the reluctant hero at their center.

In the latest addition to the series, Nowhere to Run, we’re told:

Joe Pickett was lean, of medium height and medium build. His gray Stetson Rancher was stained with sweat and red dirt. A few silver hairs caught the sunlight on his temples and unshaved chin. He wore faded Wranglers, scuff lace-up outfitter boots with stubby spurs, a red uniform shirt with the pronghorn antelope patch on his shoulder and a badge over his breast pocket with the designation GF-54.

Those are only the surface details—the skin of the man which does little to distinguish him from any number of small-town Western men you can find in pairs leaning over the bed of a pickup in autumn discussing the merits of Winchester and Remington while the ivory tips of a six-point rack poke over the tailgate.

Like many native-born Westerners, Pickett is characterized by his steady, measuring gaze and his penchant for tight lips. Here’s how Box described him in his debut novel, Open Season:

Joe had always considered individual words as finite units of currency, and he believed in savings. He never wanted to waste or unnecessarily expend words. To Joe, words meant things. They should be spent wisely.

Drill deeper below Pickett’s taciturn exterior, however, and you’ll find a character who likes to make pancakes for his girls on Saturday, a husband who suffers the near-constant insults of his mother-in-law, a lawman who is an admittedly bad shot with a pistol, and a government employee who has an allergic reaction to bureaucracy.

Pickett rarely gets along with local sheriffs, federal agents, or—most tellingly—the governor. He’s constantly reminded that his law-enforcement career began when he unwittingly fined the governor for fishing without a license, or about that time when the poacher managed to grab Joe’s gun during an arrest. Nonetheless, flaws and all, Pickett almost single-handedly protects nature against the sins of man. He roams the forests near the fictional town of Twelve Sleep, never looking for trouble, but always expecting it in a profession which deals with customers who are nearly always armed.

While his wife Marybeth is supportive and his little girls adore him, his nagging mother-in-law easily finds fault with his profession and tells him, “Don’t you think you’re getting a little old for this sort of thing? Don’t you think maybe it’s time to grow up and settle down and get a real job that provides for your family?...You’re over forty years old and your life consists of running around through the woods like a schoolboy—or a kid playing cowboys and Indians.”

That last comparison isn’t too far off the mark: Box’s mysteries are, in one sense, classic western stories where the border between black and white is clearly demarcated. Joe Pickett is Gary Cooper, John Wayne and the Lone Ranger rolled into one. He fights not only for human justice but for the environment as well. Nature is the true victim in the Pickett mysteries, always on the verge of being stabbed to death by human society.

Most of Box’s mysteries open with poached or butchered wild game—often elk—which graphically illustrates the bloody consequences of man robbing from nature. From there, the crimes open to a wider scope: man killing man.

At the beginning of Nowhere to Run, a hunter tells Pickett, “Nobody likes the idea of somebody stealing another man’s meat. That’s beyond the pale.” But that’s exactly what has happened in the Sierra Madre Mountains of southern Wyoming: a couple of bow hunters hit an elk, trailed it to the top of a mountain, but when they got there the animal had already been butchered and the meat hauled away.

Pickett is at the tail-end of a year-long assignment to the isolated town of Baggs. He’s been sequestered there in a quasi-punishment by the governor who wants to keep the trouble-magnet game warden quiet—at least until the election season is over.

When he rides into the mountains to investigate the oddly-butchered elk, trouble comes in the form of a pair of maniacal backwoods twin brothers named Grim (who says Box doesn’t have a sense of humor?) with a blatant disregard for the laws of society.

What happens next might be some of Box’s best writing to date: an extended, 120-page chase scene that begins with the Brothers Grim attacking Pickett with merciless savagery and ends with a broken and bleeding man crawling out of the wilderness. His last case in Baggs proves to be his hardest: “This was not how it was supposed to be on his last patrol. It was like walking into a convenience store for a quart of milk and realizing there was an armed robbery in progress. He didn’t feel prepared for what he’d stumbled into…He’d never felt as vulnerable and out of his depth.”

He’s soon caught up in an investigation which involves anti-government protestors, black-clad mercenaries, and a promising Olympic runner who disappeared in the mountains several years earlier.

Box winds his plots to unspool at a relentless pace, but he’s equally adept at waxing poetic about the natural world, as in this literary postcard when Pickett rides his horse into the Sierra Madres:

The vistas from the summit were like scenery overkill: mountains to the horizon in every direction, veins of aspen in the folds already turning gold, high alpine lakes and cirques like blue poker chips tossed on green felt, hundreds of miles of lodgepole pine trees, many of which were in the throes of dying due to bark beetles and had turned the color of advanced rust.

In Box’s novels, the idyllic, rugged peace of Wyoming’s backcountry is constantly under threat—typically from inept government agencies or greedy capitalists who are often painted in the broad strokes of mustache-twirling villains. In these pages, the government is always at odds with people who want nothing more than to reconnect with the natural world. Caught in the middle between law enforcement and sympathy for those who want to melt into the natural world, Joe Pickett faces a constant internal struggle. Doing what’s right and abiding by his professional code of conduct are frequently at odds. This, more than anything, is what lends the novels their depth, complexity, and genuinely-earned emotional pitch.

In Nowhere to Run, Pickett is pressed up hard and tight against his personal morality. He agonizes over taking another life—whether human or animal—and would rather talk the fugitive brothers into surrendering rather than shooting his way to a capture. His friend (and series regular) Nate Romanowski, however, says that kind of hesitation is deadly: “It isn’t about who is the fastest or toughest hombre in the state. It’s never about those things. It’s about who can look up without any mist in their eyes or doubts in their heart, aim, and pull the trigger without thinking twice. It’s about killing. It’s always been that way.”

In this book, Joe Pickett finds that one of his hardest struggles is trying to see through the mist in his eyes. By the time the last page is turned, that conflict—kill or be killed—will have shaken him to the core and he will emerge from the wilderness a changed man.

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David Abrams’ short stories and essays have appeared in Esquire, Glimmer Train Stories, The Missouri Review, and The North Dakota Review, among other publications. He is currently working on a novel loosely based on his experiences during the Iraq War. He and his wife live in Butte, Montana.