Joe Pickett is headed down a dark path this time — perhaps the darkest yet — in “The Crossroads,” the latest installment of a 26-novel series by Wyoming’s New York Times best-selling author C.J. Box.
"The Crossroads" officially debuts next Tuesday, and Box is now headed out on a national tour to promote the book. The novel has already begun appearing on retail store shelves including Cheyenne's Barnes & Noble bookstore.
His last five Pickett novels have all debuted at No. 1 on The New York Times bestseller list, and Box told Cowboy State Daily this one appears poised to make it No. 6, based on preorders.
The book opens with a hellish scene no Joe Pickett fan wants to imagine. Someone has shot the game warden in the head, leaving him for dead on a remote, dead-end crossroad in nowhere Wyoming. A random passerby finds Pickett, unresponsive, inside a vehicle riddled with bullet holes.
Deputy Frank Carroll calls Pickett’s wife to tell her the bad news.
“It’s Joe’s pickup, Marybeth,” he tells her. “He’s inside.”
There’s a long pause and then he tells her there’s blood.
“A lot of blood,” he says.
That’s the cliffhanger on the book's jacket, which Box will freely share. From there, however, he is coy about Pickett’s chances for survival.
“He’s airlifted to a hospital in Montana and Marybeth goes with him,” Box said, speaking from his ranch in Saratoga. “The three daughters, his three adult daughters, all convene at the family home.”
They’re particularly worried about the fact there’s a new sheriff in town, one they don’t know so well. One who is unfriendly and whose motives are, shall we say, suspect. That leads the three Pickett daughters to decide they should investigate the crime themselves, to try and figure out, as quickly as they can, who shot their dad and why.
The crossroads where Pickett was found is their first clue. It leads to three different, prominent ranches, any one of which — or even all of which — could have been involved in their father's attempted murder, with each having their own, unique motives.
“So, they decide to take it under their wing, to split up and interview all the dysfunctional ranch families and try to figure out what happened while their dad is in a medical coma,” Box said.
Fiction With A Real World Twist
The idea to cast Pickett as the victim came about as Box was playing around with and stretching his material a little bit. Pickett’s adult daughters, he realized, had yet to be featured all together, in the same novel, in leading roles. It felt high time to rectify that.
The only way that would work, Box decided, was a crisis of some sort, one that sidelines Pickett from his usual leading role as the lone game warden chasing down mysteries in a vast, 5,000-square-mile territory. For fiction’s sake, it wasn’t enough to just send Pickett on vacation, Box decided. The stakes needed to be much, much higher.
It’s hard to get much higher than being shot in the middle of nowhere by an unknown assailant, one who is still out there with an unknown and dangerous agenda.
Box always goes above and beyond when it comes to researching his novels. This time, he didn’t need to do much traveling for that — unlike Book No. 27, which he’s writing now. That one took him to Afton for some incognito adventures in one of the only Wyoming communities that hasn’t yet been the setting of a Joe Pickett mystery.
“The Crossroads,” though, is set closer to home in the fictional Saddlestring, Wyoming, in the fictional Twelve Sleep County. That’s a place that exists mainly in Box’s own mind.
That doesn’t mean, however, that there weren’t new and interesting realms to explore. In fact, Box loves to mix in a swirl of modern-day issues into his novels. It’s his favorite part of the whole process.
“I always want real issues,” he said. “Wyoming issues, American issues, controversies, in every book. And, in order to research those things and present them correctly, before I ever start writing, I try to find experts in the field who know a lot more about it than I do.”
Among his explorations were conversations with Cowboy State Daily and this reporter about rare earths in Wyoming, which Box said ended up being a prominent thread in the book. There were also conversations with renowned neurosurgeon Dr. Theodore Schwartz, who has written extensively about brain injuries.
“One, how to fix them,” Box said. “And two, the unanticipated things that sometimes happen afterward — if the patient recovers. Personality changes, things like that.”
Schwartz actually read some of “The Crossroads” before it was sent to Box’s publisher, verifying that all the medical details were just right.
“He corrected a few things that I had in there,” Box said. “But I found that really fascinating. I like getting into subjects I don’t really know anything about, talking to the experts.”
Radical Personality Shifts, Illegal Fentanyl Labs
One of the most interesting things Box learned through these explorations is that brain injuries can result in radical personality shifts.
“In a nutshell, a lamb can turn into a lion, and a lion can turn into a lamb,” Box said. “Very mild-mannered people who had brain injuries, some of them become just wild — wild men who leave their wives, get violent — and the other way around, too.”
That’s one of the things that even today’s highly skilled neurosurgeons can’t predict, Box said. And that makes it a perfect plot point to up the stakes and increase suspense in the latest perilous Pickett tale.
If that sounds like a potential clue to where the plot of “The Crossroads” is going, well, it kind of is, Box acknowledged.
“But the damage might be too much,” he said. “If he survives, is he going to be Joe, or someone else?”
Box also went down a few other knowledge rabbit holes for the story, including the rapidly growing interest in rare earths in Wyoming, not to mention a nascent gold boom. The Cowboy State now has two gold mining operations working in Wyoming, one near South Pass and one near Cheyenne. Then, for a twist, there’s been a rise in homegrown fentanyl operations as well.
“Because supply of fentanyl has decreased, there are people in the interior of the country now who are starting to cook it themselves with precursors,” Box said. “There were a couple of stories in the New York Times about these illegal labs, so I’ve incorporated that in the book too.”
Name In A Book Tradition Continues
Of course, the books will also have something extra layered into them that’s become a fun, Wyoming inside joke. That’s real-life Wyomingites whose names appear as random characters in the book. It’s all part of a fundraising effort for various nonprofits that is, by now, approaching a million dollars.
This time around, there are probably a few more of those names than usual, Box said. Maybe even a record for one book. The characters run the gamut.
“There’s a new sheriff in town, and so he’s named after a woman’s husband here in Saratoga who died,” Box said. "She bought the name and wanted his name in the book, and he’s very prominent. His name is Steve Sondergard. And Shawna Johnson, the restaurant group in Casper, is in this book, too.”
It can be a dicey proposition to appear in a Box book. You could end up dying in the first scene sometimes, like some inglorious Red Shirt on Star Trek, or you might be a seedy character checking into the Wolf Hotel in Saratoga. Some have turned out to be serial killers, others public figures with important roles that extended beyond just one book.
It all happens randomly Box said. It’s not something he determines ahead of time. He writes the book first, inserting placeholders for name No. X (male) or name No. X (female). A sort of blind author method, so that the fictional character will in no way be connected to the particulars of any one real-world person.
“The characters do not resemble their namesakes in any way,” Box said. "It’s just their name. I plug them in at the end, so I don’t write with the name throughout. But so, anyway, this time, there’s a lot of them.”
That just makes the books a little like an adult Easter egg hunt for Wyomingites who are fans. They know they’re likely to spot a few names of someone they know in just about every Joe Pickett adventure.
Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.
