"...stunning scenery and modern malevolence..."

Odd departmental doings also figure into C.J. Box’s “Out of Range” (Putnam, 308 pages, $24.95), the fifth in an outstanding series involving game warden Joe Pickett. A friend and colleague in another part of the state has (apparently) committed suicide, and Pickett is sent to serve as his temporary replacement. Soon he is grappling with the same thorny matters that vexed his late friend: a proposed land-use scheme that might endanger the wildlife, a vociferous bunch of environmental protesters, a politically connected developer – and the developer’s rebellious, seductive wife.

All the while, Pickett tries to deal with pressing matters back on the home front: a growing testiness in his own marriage and the malicious acts of an enemy left over from a previous book. “Are you sure you know what you’re doing?” someone asks Joe, who answers in his typically low-key way: “I never do. I just bump around sometimes until I hit something.”

“Out of Range,” with its stunning scenery and modern malevolence, combines the rural pleasures of the classic Western (close encounters with bears, an old-fashioned gunfight) with the sleuthing and forensics of the police-procedural. And Joe Pickett, with a little help from some old and new friends, proves to be more than a match for any era’s foe. By Tom Nolan