It must have taken everything C.J. Box had not to title his latest mystery novel "Meat Is Murder." It's the perfect title, since meat and hunting are the central themes of his novel, and, well, it is a murder mystery, after all.

But maybe Box has never heard of the band the Smiths. And maybe he didn't want to be seen as automatically taking the pro-vegan side of the debate over eating animals. After all, Box is a Wyoming-born writer, and as one of his characters wryly says in the novel, in Wyoming a vegetarian is somebody who only eats meat once a day.

Box's sleuth, game warden Joe Pickett, usually has enough on his plate in his rural Saddlestring district. But as the novel opens, a fellow game warden named Will Jensen has died, an apparent suicide, and Pickett is asked to temporarily fill in covering Jensen's region.

That region includes Jackson, a Wyoming city nestled in the jaw-droppingly beautiful Tetons that's flush with new money from millionaires looking to "rough it" in style. Local guides can make hefty salaries taking these tenderfoots on hunting trips, sometimes bending or breaking the rules to ensure that their clients get their prey.

There's a ton of new developments in the area, one of them a so-called "Good Meat Community," a planned development in which the millionaire residents get to raise and kill their own food.

That, of course, brings in the environmentalists and anti-animal-cruelty protesters, who basically see Jackson becoming an amusement park for wealthy carnivores. All of these competing interests put tremendous stress on Jensen, but Pickett is still puzzled as to why such a happy family man would enter a downward spiral that would culminate in his suicide.

As he settles into Jensen's old job, Pickett starts to feel some of the same pressures. The "Good Meat Community" developer is pushing him to sign off on the project. A larger-than-life local hunting guide with the memorable name of Smoke Van Horn wants Pickett to look the other way. And an animal rights protest group wants to stir things up.

"Out of Range" proceeds fairly slowly - it isn't until well past the halfway point in the book that we're sure a crime has even been committed. But what makes the novel engrossing is that Box knows his terrain like a native. Not just the physical landscape of Wyoming, but the emotional territory of its inhabitants, and how old ways and new ways can butt heads. His characters are richly drawn, and when violence occurs, it's fast and realistic and pretty awful for all concerned.

Occasionally, the story cuts back to Box's supporting cast back in Saddlestring, as his family is getting threatening phone calls and an old nemesis seems to be plotting some kind of revenge.

This is Box's fifth book featuring Pickett, and a series writer has certain obligations to keep all his characters in play for longtime readers. But this subplot is largely extraneous to "Out of Range" and could have easily been dropped.

But Box knows Wyoming as surely as Tony Hillerman knows New Mexico and Arizona, as sure as Michael Connelly knows Los Angeles. It's that knowledge, along with his insight and compassion for all sorts who live there, that makes his mystery novels worth reading.

By Rob Thomas