C. J. Box, Dark Sky *** 1/2

Evelyn typically includes a well-reviewed popular thriller among the books she gets me for Christmas. Coincidentally, the hero of this year's selection, Joe Pickett, is a game warden just like Mike Bowditch, the hero of last year's selection Dead by Dawn. Joe is in Wyoming, Mike in Maine, but perhaps they'll meet someday at a game warden convention.

In this 21st Joe Pickett adventure, Joe takes a controversial tech billionaire elk hunting. Another set of hunters is out to kill the billionaire, and they end up tracking Joe and their prey through the Bighorn Mountains. Dark Sky is not a mystery: we learn who the bad guys are and what they're planning right up front. It's an survival thriller featuring realistic Western action. The fashionable contemporary villains, I noticed, were out-of-touch liberals (the social media mogul and, in the B story, an antifa activist).

Dark Sky reads like the screenplay for a Netflix or Amazon Prime series. (Actually, the cover says it's on Paramount+ :-) The prose is as straightforward as the characters' motivations and as lean as their inner thoughts. The story has A and B plotlines to keep us engaged with the peripheral characters. People are introduced with a minimum of fuss, and past events are obliquely referred to, all as appropriate for an episode in a later season.