Steve Thomas: C.J. Box, welcome back to Circulating Ideas.
C. J. Box: Well, thank you for having me back. I appreciate it.
Steve Thomas: So when you’ve been on the podcast in the past, I’ve asked about your experience with libraries, and I was thinking to make it interesting and not just ask you the same questions over and over again, what do you think Joe Pickett’s experiences with libraries would have been growing up? Because he had kind of an interesting childhood.
C. J. Box: Oh, no one’s ever asked that question. I don’t know if Joe Pickett would have had a lot of experience with libraries growing up but later in life, yes, primarily because his wife is the director of the local library, he spends a lot of time in there. He meets up with her. She helps him out. She even does some investigative work for him cause she has access to some different databases and computers. So I think early on, probably not a lot, but later on, yes.
Steve Thomas: Yeah, and she’s a better librarian than me. She’s getting into like the dark web and…
C. J. Box: Yeah, that’s right, and through law enforcement contacts over the years, she’s gained access to some databases that she shouldn’t have access to.
Steve Thomas: But helpful to Joe. So for those who may be new to the Joe Pickett series, can you kind of set the stage for Battle Mountain?
C. J. Box: Sure. In the previous book called Three-Inch Teeth, it was about grizzly bears, hence the title. It was a very dark book. There were dual plotlines going on with both a real rogue grizzly bear and a machine that was made by some very bad guys to mimic grizzly bear attacks. One of the bad guys involved was involved with the murder of Nate Romanowski’s wife. Nate Romanowski is a outlaw falconer with a Special Forces background, and it was a very grisly scene. And the only opening thread of Three-Inch Teeth was the fact that anyone who’s read the books knew that Nate would have to be going for revenge against the guy who did this, and that’s where Battle Mountain starts.
Steve Thomas: And Joe Pickett, the title character of the series, he’s a game warden in Wyoming.
C. J. Box: Correct.
Steve Thomas: And he’s got his own plotline going in Battle Mountain as well.
C. J. Box: Right. Dual storylines. Nate is on his search for revenge with a fellow falconer named Geronimo Jones, who’s also been wronged by the bad guy named Axel Soledad.
Joe Pickett is asked by the governor of Wyoming to investigate the disappearance of his son-in-law, who happens to be an elk hunting guide. The governor wants it wrapped up very quickly, doesn’t want his daughter and wife to know that his son-in-law is missing so asks Joe to do it as quickly as he can.
So while Nate moves across the state in search of Axel Soledad, Joe Pickett’s investigation takes him to a place where they’ll both end up. And the two storylines will culminate at a place called Battle Mountain, Wyoming.
Steve Thomas: Can you tell us a little bit about Battle Mountain? I mean, it’s a real place, right?
C. J. Box: It is a real place, yeah. I live on a ranch in South Central Wyoming, and less than 50 miles away, there’s a place where, in the 1830s, I believe it was, there was a group of mountain men, beaver trappers who got into a battle with American Indians and barely escaped with their lives. They held out for a few days. They finally got away, a few of them died, and the mountain men then named that place Battle Mountain, so it actually exists.
Steve Thomas: Yeah, like you said, Joe does have his own story, but a lot of the heft of the story, I think, is Nate’s story of coming back for revenge. Over the series, Nate started off the way he kind of is now in this book, but he’s sort of built civilization on top of him a little bit after he got married, had a [00:04:00] kid, started a business, and then now that’s kind of all been stripped away from him and he’s back to his core. He’s obviously still raw in this book, but how has he changed in this book from how he has built himself up?
C. J. Box: Sure. Well, yeah, in a way he’s sort of changed back, and that’s a big part of the book is that he blames himself for his wife’s death because he felt like that he wasn’t there and he wasn’t sharp enough and he wasn’t alert enough like he used to be. So after that happens with his wife, he starts to pursue Axel Soledad but realizes he needs to re-hone his skills. So he vanishes into an area with his birds, with his falcons, and kind of reacquaints himself with what makes him Nate Romanowski in the first place before he starts to go after the bad guy with Geronimo’s help.
Steve Thomas: Can you tell listeners about Axel Soledad? He’s had a history of coming in and out of the series a couple times and obviously is a pretty nasty person.
C. J. Box: Sure. In a way, he’s kind of a younger version of Nate Romanowski, but instead of going one direction, he’s gone the other direction. Axel Soledad is also ex Special Forces. He feels very betrayed by his government and that’s his motivation factor in all of the appearances that he’s made is that he wants to get back at his superiors and to the government that sent him and left him out to dry in some really violent situations. And Axel Soledad in this book is able to recruit quite a few people who feel the same way.
Steve Thomas: Yeah, there’s a group of veterans, but he’s also canny enough that he knows that’s not gonna be enough, and he gets disaffected people on the left as well, who are like, just, I don’t know how you would describe them, and they’re the kind of ultra hippies, I guess, for the modern age.
C. J. Box: Mm hmm. Yeah, kind of Antifa types but also, Axel Soledad, being the diabolical person he is, just sort of considers them cannon fodder in any kind of thing that might happen. He doesn’t mind if they don’t make it.
Steve Thomas: Yeah, and just tells them what they want to hear, basically, because there’s a little bit of a crossover in their beliefs in that they both believe the government is the problem and they need to take down the government. It’s just, he does not really care about their reasoning behind hating the government.
C. J. Box: Right. As long as they do what he tells them to, he’s fine with them.
Steve Thomas: Yeah. And being a vet himself, he understands… I mean, he’s kind of gone really over the line into being evil, but he understands that he can’t cross a certain line with the vets he’s working with because they will actually have some kind of honor that might prevent them from going through with what he’s wanting to do, so he doesn’t even tell them the whole story of what he’s going to do either.
C. J. Box: That’s right, yeah, he’s quite a master manipulator, has been since he was introduced, and so he is a great nemesis.
Steve Thomas: And you mentioned the falcons. How do you feel like that ties into Nate’s personality? Like, why does he have such a connection with the falcons, do you think?
C. J. Box: I think it really has to do with the fact that, it just connects him with the natural world in a way that he really needs and that he understands almost better than anyone. And in this book, his sojourn into the wilderness, into isolation, really hones that and also hones the connection between him and his falcon. That’s a subject I’ve been fascinated with since I started writing the books and started hanging around with falconers and going falconry hunting is the fact that it’s more of a business relationship between the falcon and falconer. It’s not like a pet and a master because the bird can just fly away at any time. Very dedicated master falconers spend a lot of time and energy and money on keeping their birds in good shape and hunting for them, knowing that their bird could vanish any time they go off their fist.
Steve Thomas: And you’ve obviously done a lot of research on it because it’s really clear that they have that bond, and even Joe’s daughter Sheridan, who used to work with Nate, but now has just had the business sort of thrust into her lap. And that’s a lot of her plot in this book is figuring out what to do now. She’s not hugely in this book, but that’s a lot of it is just like, “I don’t know how to run a small business!”
C. J. Box: Right. Yeah, and that’s fun. I always like writing sections with the daughters and Sheridan being the oldest and yeah, you’re right. She’s come into her own.
Steve Thomas: Like you said, you’ve got the multiple storylines going together. When you’re writing the storylines like that, like, are you an outliner kind of person? How do you get it all lined up? Because, you know, you want to hit the peaks of the stories at the right times. And each chapter is going back and forth between stories. And how do you make sure in the writing process that you’re getting those lined up well?
C. J. Box: I am an outliner. I always start with the major controversies or themes or issues that I’m going to cover. Some I don’t know very much about going in, so I need to do the research. Others I do. With this book, I was very familiar with where I wanted to go and what I wanted to cover and how to do it. And then I just start a bullet point outline from the opening through the end, knowing that I might change it when I get to the end, but at least that way I know which way to go.
I love writing alternate storylines because I think it keeps it fast moving and hopefully page turning for the reader. And I enjoy reading those kind of books too. So it makes it a little trickier doing that. It would be much easier if it was just pretty straightforward, but in this case, especially, I like how Joe and Nate close in on each other without even knowing it and finally meet up, but we don’t need to talk about the circumstances of that.
Steve Thomas: No, but definitely all of the storylines kind of converge on each other there and you mentioned that Joe’s doing a mission for the governor, and this is the governor who’s been in the books in the past and was the governor and then wasn’t governor and then got reelected. Can you talk about that character a little bit in his relationship with Joe?
C. J. Box: Rulon, Governor Rulon. Yeah, he’s a fun character to write. He’s kind of a renegade governor. Wyoming is probably one of the reddest states in the country, but in my books, the governor is a Democrat, but a Democrat who spends all of his time suing the federal government and going after them, and is very popular, and he’s very charismatic. He saved Joe Pickett a few times from scrapes, so Joe feels like he owes him, but Joe also knows that the governor might call on him, like he does in this one, to do a mission on his behalf that Joe can’t really refuse, and the governor does it in such a way that if Joe screws up the governor has plausible deniability if anything happens.
Steve Thomas: And I think you do a good job. I think you’ve done this in past books, too, of reading the room. You’ve really got the political disaffection that’s in the country right now of people really disaffected with the government, and that comes out in different ways in different characters, but I think you give the characters depth, so it’s not just, “Hey, I’m a Make America Great Again person,” the stereotype or whatever, but you see the different ways that that affects people, because, you can see the reason why they were disaffected. And then their different responses to it, because you get your Axels, but you get your Nates, and obviously, even Joe has been screwed over by the government sometimes and he works for the government.
C. J. Box: Yeah, he is the government. Yeah, that’s right. And I think that reflects a lot of the Mountain West, the viewpoints not just politically, ,but the fact that so much of the Mountain West is owned by the federal government, like in the state of Wyoming, where I live, it’s almost 50 percent of the total landmass. So that means different federal agencies run the state, so there’s a lot of conflict between the agencies themselves, between the agencies and state agencies, and between local law enforcement, that really does exist. And I try to reflect that that’s kind of the atmosphere, that’s how it’s different.
Steve Thomas: And then you have a new addition to the Joe Pickett universe of Susan Kany in this book. Can you talk about her character and what she brings to the story?
C. J. Box: Sure. Susan Kany is also a game warden, like Joe Pickett, but she’s younger. That was kind of a fun part of the book. She’s younger and, almost the age of Joe Pickett’s daughters, and Joe finds himself feeling very very old around this other employee, but I like their relationship and the way it goes and in some cases Susan Kany says things to Joe that he knows his daughters would say to him and it just throws him off But he also he also likes her and respects her but he can’t tell her everything, and that creates some sparks.
Steve Thomas: There’s other authors that write in the West, like Craig Johnson. Who do you like that writes in these, or maybe even before you started writing, is there anybody that writes in this… I don’t know if genre is not really the right word, but these types of stories that you like reading or you get inspiration from?
C. J. Box: Well, you know, Tony Hillerman was the sort of the godfather when it came to writing what at the time was considered regional fiction, but in a way that created a national and international audience. And so I was kind of in his wake. I didn’t try to pattern the books after his books, but I always liked and appreciated how he used the setting and the locality as a very, very important part of the novel.
And it’s not unique to the West by any means. I mean, I’m a fan of any fiction writer that renders the place very well. That could be Cormac McCarthy or Michael Connelly or anybody who makes you feel like you’re you know as much about that place as a native. I always feel that that’s a secondary great pleasure out of a novel.
Steve Thomas: This is the 25th book in the series, and you did mention that Joe’s feeling a little old himself in the series. Do you have any recommendations for a book for somebody who hasn’t read the series before as a starting point, or do you think just, I mean, I know you try to make all of them accessible. Like this one maybe isn’t the first best first one since it’s catching up from the previous book, or just, whichever one will work for you?
C. J. Box: I do try to make them all very much stand alone. Like you said, this is an exception. If my wife was doing this interview, she would say, you must start with Open Season, the very first book, and there’s reasons for that. That’s where Joe was introduced. His young family is introduced. I think from that book, you could pick up later, any place in the series and have that kind of grounding. I’m always kind of amazed and impressed that 25 books into the series, I still meet people who this will be their first one which is something I always have to keep in mind, not to make them too insular, but luckily the sales continue to grow. So that means new people are buying the new books maybe for the first time and that’s, I love that.
Steve Thomas: Yeah, well, and I’m sure you work to make Battle Mountain as accessible as possible as well. I mean, it reads obviously much better because it’s continuing right out after the last book, but the Joe Pickett part of the book is not quite as tied to the previous one, and really all you need to know is something terrible happened to Nate’s family, let’s go.
C. J. Box: Yeah, that’s right, that’s right, and with a long series like this I think that’s a trick for anybody who’s lucky enough to be able to write this many books, is you’ve got to provide background material that a new reader is not lost, but not so much that a longtime reader has to roll their eyes and go, “God, I have to go over this land ground again!” It’s a fine line. Hopefully I reach it.
Steve Thomas: I know writers are always ahead on what they’re actually promoting. Do you have any thoughts on the challenges that Joe Pickett will be facing next?
C. J. Box: Yes, I’m deeply into the next Joe Pickett book. I’m actually ahead of schedule to the point where I almost feel bad that I’m going to have to put it aside and go on the book tour in a week because it’s really going well, but it’s a book that really involves all three of his daughters. In fact, they are more in the forefront of the next book than Joe or Marybeth or Nate, which is something I’ve been wanting to do for quite a while because I love the interplay between the daughters. But they all have a common mission, and Joe’s almost in the background.
Steve Thomas: That’s great to hear. I always look forward to seeing the girls. We see more of Sheridan, I think, because she’s just local there. And also they’ve been taking care of Nate’s daughter while he’s been off in his revenge mission as well, so they have an extra little girl around.
C. J. Box: That’s right. It makes Joe and Mary Beth wonder if they’re ever going to have any grandkids of their own, which is a feeling I understand, although I have four now, so.
Steve Thomas: But you did understand it at one point and also what it’s like to be older and go, “Oh, this is much harder to deal with toddlers when I’m 50-something!”
C. J. Box: Yeah, that’s why it’s fun as a grandparent because you don’t have to do it full time.
Steve Thomas: The book is Battle Mountain, it’s available now for purchase or you can get a copy, of course, at your local public library. That gets sales to CJ too, so that’s fine.
C. J. Box: Yes, it does. And it always amazes me when I talk to other authors and they think that a book in a library somehow hurts their sales, not realizing that their sales force is the library. And librarians recommend books to people, even if they aren’t on the shelves, and that means a lot. And librarians read, which is pretty nice.
Steve Thomas: Yeah. Well, and you can, you can discover a book at the library and then go, “Oh, I’m in the bookstore. Oh, look, a new CJ Box book. I’ll pick that up. I read the previous books in the library, but now I’m here at the airport or whatever. I’ll grab one!” So you get that tasting.
All right. Well, thank you so much, CJ, for coming on the show again. I loved the book. It was a good adventure story. And I look forward to hearing more about, the Pickett girls in the next book.
C. J. Box: Thank you. I hope you like it and thanks for having me back.
Steve Thomas: All right. Have a great day.
C. J. Box: You too. Bye.
***
Rebecca Vnuk: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Circ Desk. I’m Rebecca Vnuk, the Executive Director of Library Reads.
Yaika Sabat: And I’m Yaika Sabat, a librarian working for Novelist.
Rebecca Vnuk: And today’s read alike that we’re looking for is going to be Battle Mountain by C. J. Box. And the first thing that came to my mind on this, so I know, boy, Yaika, do you remember how many books are in this series even?
Yaika Sabat: This is the twenty-fifth.
Twenty fifth!
In the Joe Pickett Novels, yes.
Rebecca Vnuk: So right, clearly we could come up with lots of long running series for you. And I think, again, I’m sure Yaika is going to hit us with some great reader’s advisory advice on what to pull out from your patron on what they’re looking for for this kind of book. So what I decided to do for the Library Reads angle is the first author that comes to mind for CJ Box as a read alike is Jane Harper. And when I went to go look at our list, I realized, ah, she is one of our longtime Hall of Fame authors. So I wanted to take this moment, I’m not saying that Jane Harper is the only read alike for CJ Box, but I’m going to maybe concentrate on that for just a moment, on the Library Reads angle talking about our Hall of Fame list.
So I don’t know how many people realize this, but for the Library Reads list, we’ve been around for 11 years now, we have 2, 000 books in our archive, and around maybe five years into it, we realized that eventually our list was just going to become all best selling authors, right? Because that’s what everybody’s reading and that’s what they’re voting for. So we wanted to figure out, well, how can we pay attention to those authors and how good they are, but also leave some room on the list for newer authors and midlist authors and that kind of thing.
So we created the Hall of Fame, which is a separate list that comes out at the same time every month. And it is authors who have hit our list three times, then they get placed on our Hall of Fame. So we still give them space in our flyer and we still promote them. They just kind of go into their own little land, Hall of Fame land.
And one of the things that we’re excited about, so Jane Harper is a good example of this because she has five books and they are all, they’ve all hit our list. So after her third one, she got into our Hall of Fame and one of the things that I wanted to say about the readers’ advisory aspect of that is, so okay, the Pickett novels, there’s 20 of them, but the Jane Harper books, I mean, there’s five. That’s a good start for someone if they’re looking for, “Hey, I really like this, and now I want more.” Great, I’ve got four others I can give you. So I was trying to look for somebody who had kind of a stretch of novels there, and she’s got five.
But what I wanted to point out about our Hall of Fame is we are actually later this month, we will be switching over to each of our Hall of Fame authors right now has their headshot in our gallery and then it leads you off to usually the publisher page about them. Well, we are in the middle of creating a separate list for all of our Hall of Fame authors so when you click on it, it will bring up every title of theirs that has been in the library reads list so you’ve got another flyer that you can print out. Put it at your circ desk, put in your stacks, like by the Jane Harper books would be great. Or maybe put this up where your CJ Box books are and let people know, hey, there’s something similar. So I’m hoping that this will get people to take a look at those lists and start using them in their library. So that’s my little Library Reads commercial for today. So Yaika, give us some good book recommendations, please.
Yaika Sabat: All right. Well, the Joe Pickett novels by CJ Box are wildly popular. We actually had him come to one of the libraries I worked at, and it was absolutely packed. It’s a library in Texas. He’s very well beloved. And if you think of the books, the immediate ones that come to mind for read-alikes are things like the Longmire mysteries. You’ve got that sort of rural figure investigating these cases, maybe a little bit gruff. You know, lone hero sense sometimes, but thriller and suspense novels are a genre that compared to other genres in adult fiction have not embraced a diversity of perspectives as much, I’ve noticed.
And so I really wanted to be intentional and see what I could find that wasn’t the Walt Longmire mysteries or the Down Range, the Garrett Cole novels by Taylor Moore. So I did a little digging and part of this involved using some tools that I actually really like about NoveList. One way to try and add some diversity is to look at the author’s cultural identity. And so I went to our advanced search page and was able to select different cultural identities for authors to see what had been written. And yeah, it was great doing that. You can also go and limit by appeals, and one of those appeals is identities. And so we’ve added it to where you can search by the identities of the characters.
Rebecca Vnuk: That is so great.
Yaika Sabat: Yes. It’s one of my favorite things. We’re always adapting and updating terms because it’s a living vocabulary. It changes. But I find it really helpful when I’m doing work, especially if it’s a genre where you have to dig a little to find it.
So I wanted to focus on sort of that rural police element because that is such a defining trait of the series. So when I was searching, one that came up is actually a newer series. It’s the Eva “Lightning Dance” Duran novels by Deborah J. Ledford. I believe the first one is called Redemption from 2023. Deborah J. Ledford is part Eastern Band Cherokee and the protagonist of the series is an indigenous woman. The first one is actually about Deputy Eva “Lightning Dance” Duran, who dives into a case investigating four women who vanish from the Taos Pueblo reservation. One of them is her best friend and she has to deal with things like a lack of interest from her department and teams up with a tribal police officer. And so you’re having these dynamics and this person working against the odds, which I think is very similar to what you can find in the CJ box novels, but I do really like that this one also touches on something like missing and murdered indigenous women. And it is from a more Own Voices perspective, so you still get that same sense. You’re just getting a new take on it, which I think can be really refreshing. If it has the same vibe, readers are willing to try it. It’s just going to give them a new element.
And that one is technically a mystery, but I think it has a lot of the same traits. And then the next one is a rural noir. And I will say, if someone loves the rural police element, ask them if they’re really stuck to a thriller or suspense, or ask if they’re willing to look into rural noir, because that’s gonna have a lot of those same characteristics. So never be afraid to ask if they’re willing to try a different genre, because that can open possibilities for you. One I came across was My Darkest Prayer by S. A. Cosby, who we all know is a thriller icon. It’s from 2022. It is just like the C. J. Box Joe Pickett novels. It’s intricately plotted, it’s gritty, it’s suspenseful, and it’s rural noir, so it has that element, but it is about a man who is working at his cousin’s funeral home, but is a former Marine and a sheriff’s deputy, and he lives in a little Southern town, has sort of built up the reputation of the guy you’re going to go to when you’ve tried everything else. And so in this one a local minister is found dead, and so the parishioners go to him to try and get the truth and make sure that his case is not neglected or slept under the rug. And so it has, again, that person working against odds and digging into the truth to try and help people in a rural community. So I think that could work very well.
Rebecca Vnuk: Excellent choice. I love it. I love it. I think that that rural aspect is definitely, that is the main draw of this kind of stuff, because that, that sort of….
Yaika Sabat: It tends to be more isolated, there’s fewer resources, things are done a little bit differently in rural or smaller towns. And so it is a different dynamic.
Rebecca Vnuk: The setting is just as important as the characters and the plotline. Like, I think that is a huge draw. That’s why people keep coming back and these series run for so long cause that’s a big part of it. All right. Well, great. Hopefully people will like these suggestions, and we will check you out next time at the Circ Desk!
Circulating Ideas 